March 12th, 2010
Your online identity, which is key to enabling a personalized Web experience, is not simply a single atom of data. It is a dense cluster of your accounts (e.g. e-mail, banking, shopping, etc.), relationships and other personal information, spread across the Web and throughout all of your personal computing devices.
Your Web browser, as your most trusted relationship in your life online, has nearly perfect knowledge of everything you do on the Web. We envision a world where your browser will play an even more active and critical role in helping you control and shape your online experience.
To realize this vision, we need to increase the browser’s understanding of your online identity and provide a platform for building new capabilities that securely take advantage of this rich, dynamic set of data that represents the digital “you.”
And so, today we are announcing an initiative as part of the Mozilla Labs Concept Series to explore these and other new concepts for online identity in the browser.
Ideas, Use Cases and Open Questions
Here are some of the initial ideas, use cases and open questions to help get things started.
- As you connect with new sites and people online, how can your browser help you manage all of your account information?
- How can your browser help when you discover something cool on the Web that you want to share with your friends?
- What role can your browser play in helping you manage your Web contacts and relationships?
- What can your browser do to enable you to securely share data with websites and third-parties in return for context-rich Web experiences?
- How can your browser help you manage and stay informed about how and where your data and data about you flows on the Web?
Guiding Principles
We believe any solution that helps people take control and manage their online identity should:
- ensure that it is easy for people to set up their own services (as needed) with freely available open standards-based tools
- provide users with the ability to fully control and customize their online experience, including whether and how their data should be shared with their family, their friends, and third-parties
- respect individual privacy (e.g. client-side encryption by default with the ability to delegate access rights)
- leverage existing open standards and propose new ones as needed
Initial Concepts and Prototypes
Over the next few weeks, you will see a wide range of activities as we begin a focused exploration through the Mozilla Labs Concept Series and host discussions with the wider Internet community about your online identity. We hope that you’ll add your voice to the discussion.
To kick things off, we will be releasing a series of initial concepts and prototypes to provide thought, facilitate discussion, and inspire future design directions for Firefox, the Mozilla project, and the Web as a whole.
How to Get Involved
- Read more about and explore the initial concepts and prototypes for Online Identity
- Learn more about the Mozilla Labs Weave project
- Discuss, debate and add to the conversation around online identity in the Online Identity Concepts discussion group
- Join us in #labs on irc.mozilla.org.
– Ragavan Srinivasan on behalf of the Mozilla Labs team
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