Eve (aka xmlgrrl) posted the following bit of musing today..

Circles of trust: disaster? or really bad idea?
http://www.xmlgrrl.com/blog/archives/2008/01/21/circles-of-trust-disaster-or-really-bad-idea/

..which I tend to think hits the proverbial nail pretty squarely on the head wrt “open internet”, “trust all comers”, and “trust circles”.

One very small, detail-level comment I have on her post is that where she writes..

(where users are okay with this sort of back-channel communication)

..I would instead make it explicitly clear that “users” sometimes don’t have any direct say with respect to the machinations of the IT department on their behalf. Hence I would write it as..

(where users are okay with this sort of back-channel communication, or where they don’t have any say (e.g. in an enterprise deployment))

Note I don’t feel that the latter is necessarily a good thing, but it’s reality in corporate, governmental, and education worlds (at least), and no amount of attesting that “I want to own my identity data!” is going to change it any time soon (admittedly unfortunately). Besides one’s identity, outside of one’s own thoughts, “..is a story“, as Bob Blakley noted a while back, but has been understood for quite a while by social scientists and philosophers (see, for example, Erving Goffman).

But I digress… 😉