The company’s director of government affairs EMEA, Matt Lambert, said that the changes would include increased options, enabling users to choose the level of information they share with Passport and participating web sites, as well as more information on data protection to enable users to make informed choices.
We’ve been in a dialogue [with the EC] for some time and it’s been an open and fruitful discussion, said Lambert. The most important thing is to put users and consumers in charge of their information. From the details given by Microsoft it appears that the changes will influence what information EU users give to Passport and third parties, rather than what Microsoft does with that information.
Additional changes will include a prompt box, which will appear on screen when users designate themselves as European Union residents, and will summarize key information about privacy policies in the EU. There will also be a link to the European Commission’s web site on data protection laws outside the EU to help users make decisions about how much information they share online. There will also be guidance to help users to create secure passwords.
Lambert said that although the information will only be presented to users who identify themselves as EU residents, the changes will not affect how Microsoft uses the information supplied by any user. We don’t use the data for anything other than identification, he said. The user chooses when to give their information to third parties.
Lambert said the changes will be implemented into Passport globally over the next two to 18 months, but was unable to give more a detailed description of what stages the implementation process will take.
The Passport changes were agreed with the EC’s Article 29 Working Party on data protection to ensure that the product reflects the requirements of the European Data Protection Directive.
The deployment and implementation of the changes will be monitored by the Working Party, which has also produced a working document that includes data protection guidelines for Passport, as well as Sun Microsystems Inc-backed Liberty Alliance Project, and any future online authentication systems.
Source: Computerwire
