Identity Management and the real world

There have been a number of changes in the Identity Management space recently, through from the renaming of InfoCard to CardSpace http://msdn.microsoft.com/winfx/reference/infocard/default.aspx, through to the most recent acquisition of RSA by EMC (more on this once the dust has settled) http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9001534, but still there seems to be a great disconnect between Identity Management in the technology space, and the way we deal with identities in the real world.

In the real world we live in communities (mostly) and these communities are built up around relationships between people and the privacy, trust, secrecy, accountability, reputation of the individuals involved, yet in the technological world, whilst these communities are developing, this is not happening, and has no real sign of it.

Why is it, that 13 years on from trying to set up real trust models in the form of Trusted Third Parties, we are still in the position which Peter Steiner outlined by with the cartoon, of "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog."

We need to bear in mind however, that we are still in a position, where in the real world, nobody knows either. Take for example the latest bank manager who ebezzled £21 million over 5 years, and during that time was nominated as Manager of the Year! http://www.moneyweek.com/file/14565/bank-manager-jailed-for-10-years.html

We need to get the industry's which we deal with on a day to day basis to stop thinking about Identity Management purely in technical terms as a way of decreasing the numbers of user repositories that they have, and the numbers of logons that their users have, and think about it more in real world terms. The solutions exist for this, people just seem to be missing the point, and dragging things back into the technological pit.