Online Identity Project Pairs Industry, Academe

IBM, Novell, and Parity Communications announced support for the Higgins Project. Sponsored by the Eclipse Open Software Foundation and Harvard Law School’s Berman Center for Internet and Society, Higgins aims to give consumers direct control over their online identities.

Higgins divides an identity into Web services, letting people control who can access parts of that information. The three companies are contributing code to the software. Microsoft is working on similar technology with its InfoCard identity metasystem.

Internet News, 27 February 2006