Caught your attention? ;-) I think that's why he chose this title.

I just attentended a talk with that title at IIW by Brad Templeton, who is the chair of the board of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and as such pretty influential. He wasn't actually talking about OpenID itself, but about pretty much all technologies that make it easier for users to share identity information on-line. I think his core points are as follows:

• The easier it is for individuals to share identity information on-line, the more often it will done, and the more often sites will require it. As a result, more personal information will be shared, which is worrisome from a privacy perspective.
• On one hand, user-centric idea is a great idea. On the other hand, it removes the ability of the users to negotiate with a similar clout as the service providers, and as a result we might actually get less privacy than in case of a more centralized system such Microsoft Passport, with could have benefited from the negotiation clout of a Microsoft. (He was clear that he was not advocating that, of course.)

He was clear (after he had stated the title ... ;-)) that he wanted to be a contrarian with this talk, and that he consciously overstated his case. Primarily to make sure that we technologists building these technologies understand the unintended consequences.

I think he's right about both points, but I also think that there are many counter-trends to that. For example, the easier it is to share information on-line, the less need there is for service providers to store the information, which leads to a net increase in data security (e.g. no backup tapes of my address can be stolen if the service provider does not store it because they know that I can very easily provide it again and thus they have the option not to store it.)

Worth blogging and thinking about though ...