The White House’s new plan for strengthening authentication and identity verification on the web is a good first step for securing identities in online transactions and creating a trusted digital environment. In the draft strategy, entitled the “National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace” (NSTIC), the government calls for an Identity Ecosystem, an online environment where individuals, organizations and devices trust each other because authoritative sources establish and authenticate their digital identities. (more…)

In the UK, identity fraud has been identified as one of the fastest growing crimes in 2009. In response to this alarming news, the UK government is kicking off a National Identity Fraud Prevention Week to try to raise awareness about the issue and focus on what individuals and businesses can do to protect themselves.

With a website devoted to the new campaign, it’s easy to take a quick look at some statistics about fraud in the UK, and some of them are quite frightening. While the information on the site is based on UK numbers, the concerns that those statistics raise are likely applicable in many countries, as identify theft is a world-wide problem. (more…)

One day before Valentine’s Day, Computerworld put out a terrific article focused on the technology used in the online dating industry, an industry growing 10% annually according to Forrester Research. This is timely news as the highest demand for internet dating sites comes just before Valentine’s Day, when most sites double their traffic, if not quadruple it.  In the article, titled “Online Dating: The Technology Behind the Attraction,” editor Robert Mitchell outlines four basic and necessary steps for the online dating business model:

1. Provide visitors with instant feedback (or matches)
2. Convert visitors from “Just Looking” to “Paid Customers”
3. Deliver high quality connections or matches
4. Keep the quality of the prospect pool high, by weeding out scammers, spammers and fraudsters. (more…)