The Trust Foundation Understanding trust issues in the digital era.

“Microsoft's chief research and strategy officer Craig Mundie highlighted the natural tension between security and anonymity. "Increasingly the identity question is part of how we deal with trusting people, and the processes of how we manage people and their operation. Identity, and the claims around identity, are going to be critical in terms of how we find the structural balance between the privacy requirements in a given context and the security requirements."

But he also suggested that pressure for verifiable online identities won't only come from government or business. "Society will come to demand more reliable presentation of credentials and information about people in order to feel comfort, and we will see the emergence of the need for these new forms of credentialing. I think it's a natural thing, and as long as people are given the choice between having it and not having it, as a function of what they seek to gain access to, then I think we'll find a happy medium."

The amount of information being stored online is growing at an alarming rate. What is more important is to protect the information stored online but this has proven to be expensive and challenging. More people are requesting social networks and online gaming sites have some form of verification to users in order to trust the people they are interacting with on these sites. In the next five years or so, there will be a strong demand for such verification services. Read more about public identity services here.