Establish Identity Fortress

# Establishing your Privacy & Identity Fortress

##
Congratulations on your decision to own your own information.

Let's go over the steps by which you'll establish your Privacy Fortress called MyOwnInformation.

1. First, we'll create something called a "stub certificate," a digital certificate that contains only your name and email address.
2. If you don't already have an ID Commons identity such as OpenID or i-Name we'll create one for you.
3. Since we'll be assisting you in establishing your claim of ownership of information about yourself, we'll need a license from you to use some of that information in the process. After all, it's your information, not ours, and we need your permission to use it. (Shouldn't everyone treat your information that way?)
4. Ownership of information is accomplished with two legal devices: copyright and trade secret. Since copyright law covers collections of information called "works," your information will take the form of an autobiographical reference work. It's a collection of facts about yourself, starting with information from your birth certificate and from the IDs you'll present to a notary ("foundational information.")
5. With your foundational information we'll create a printable affidavit that you will take to a notary public of your choice in order to start the process of creating your reliable identity.
6. The notary will ask you to recite the affidavit as an oath, and sign it. The notary will then sign and seal the bottom portion, called the Jurat or Notarial Certificate.
7. An Enrollment Officer will then instruct you on creating a new digital certificate that is much more meaningful than the stub certificate that you created to get things started. You'll start as you did in Step 1, but additionally you'll provide a scanned image of your affidavit and identity credentials to the Certification Authority. Assuming that all is in order, the Certification Authority will sign your new Class 2 identity certificate.

So our first step will be to get you a stub certificate.
Click to begin making your stub certificate.