Facebook Wants to Issue Your IRL Offline ID & Internet Driver’s License
At the start of this year, it seemed as if Facebook wanted to utilize its identity infrastructure already on millions of websites in order to issue your Internet driver’s license. Apparently that wasn’t aiming quite take-over-the-world high enough, since it now appears as if Facebook, via a trademark application, wants to issue your in-real-life offline identity cards as well.
By Ms. Smith on Mon, 10/17/11 – 1:23pm.
At the start of this year, it seemed as if Facebook wanted to utilize its identity infrastructure already on millions of websites in order to issue your Internet driver’s license. Apparently that wasn’t aiming quite high enough, since it now appears as if Facebook has future plans to issue your offline identity cards as well. Facebook filed for a trademark for “goods and services” to use Facebook on “cards, namely business cards and non-magnetically encoded identity cards” that could be read by NFC and RFID-enabled devices. If that didn’t make you shiver, then the new trademark application states, the “business card and identity card design services” and “printing services” would be for “facilitating social and business networking through the provision of data for use on business and identity cards.”
Like Google Plus, Facebook regards pseudonyms as a sin and wants to kill off anonymity. Many sites have cut back on comment spam, though, by requiring Facebook Connect which in turn requires a user’s real identity. Countless millions of websites have avoided the headaches and hassles of managing their own identity system by implementing the free and easy code for Facebook Connect to manage online identities. In fact, logging in, “liking” and sharing via Facebook has literally become a critical part of the Internet’s identity infrastructure.
