Identification for financial business-processes.

Dear Stake Holder,

This is just a short response to your post about authentication and my take on how it applies to what I'm working on these days.

Yes, indeed all users are authenticated when they touch our objects, when they use or wear our objects. What does it mean for our business? Not so much as you can see if you consider how low is the barrier of entrance into VW's struggling (and competing) for numbers/quantity of customers. We all understand that they are responsible to their investors and want to show 'growth', but...

So, the information users are providing is unreliable, is not verified and will not be such (IMHO) in the forseable future.

However! There is one important aspect and I think I had mentioned it before, during one of our meetings. If a person is participating in VW or MMO game environment he has 'assets' there and that's what makes him or her to act in a way not putting them at risk. In other words, do we need that personal information AT ALL after all? Maybe we don't. We only need our customers to 'behave' when they are using our commerce and payments solutions. That's all we need. In this respect your observation about authentication is very important, but I need to remind that what is good and 'unintrusive' for building social applications poses a certain problem to commercial or financial types of relationsips, because they are durable. We need to 'stay in touch' with the customer at all times, because he had entered his offerings or 'wishes' into our marketplace system or because he owes us money. Also, what if a complaint against a marketplace participant will be filed a bit later? And he has 'UN-subscribed' already? I don't see a way to resolve it then.

My point is: what is good for social applications is not necessarily good for ongoing financial or commercial DURABLE relationship with a customer. So, please use this idea (and I understand how great it is) within the social layer of the service not in my 'garden'. :) PLEASE! :)