Online identity authentication protocols have no choice but to cease using credit bureaus

Anyone who has ever wondered about the pros and cons of making online purchases with a credit card is sure to recognize how easy it is to initiate a transaction over the Web.  These days, all it takes is a credit card, and one can be whisked away to gorge in any imaginable online service or commodity.  Even those age-restricted goods that are supposed to be more closely regulated, such as online prescriptions, pornography, alcohol and online casino gambling, can be just as accessible as ordering movie tickets or making a travel reservation.

It is for this reason that one of the leading providers of online identity and age verification services, Aristotle International, conducted and released the details of a two-week study regarding consumer opinions and attitudes toward the procedures used for verifying identity over the Web.  According to the study done on five-hundred subjects, 82.7% of British and American 18-20 year olds reported having a credit card in their name, while a surprising 36.1% of 14-17 year-olds also reported possessing at least one credit card, ultimately suggesting that underage teenagers are likely gaining access to the websites they are supposed to be banned from (pornography, alcohol, online casinos).

For cases in which it is perfectly legal for young people to possess credit cards, the same question arises time and again - What steps are being taken to validate birthdates, and consequently bar underage Web surfers from visiting certain sites? At the current time, there are three methods of verifying age and identity on the internet.  The first, and most widely used system is through the major credit bureaus, like Experian and Equifax, which use credit reports and the credit cards themselves to verify age and identity.  Another commonly used system is called aggregators, which in essence, is just like the aforementioned system in that aggregators often use information provided by the credit bureaus.  Not only is this method prone to unreliability, every time your identity is checked in this manner, a record of where you made a credit purchase is recorded on your credit report. 

The largest inherent weakness in these two methods is that credit reports can be notoriously misleading.  In fact, a study conducted by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission in 2004, reported that approximately 50% of all credit bureau reports contained at least one serious mistake.  Using credit bureaus' as real-time sources for authenticating customers, the data which a site visitor (credit card holder) inputs is compared to the data provided on the credit report, which is then given a score that indicates the likelihood of an identity match.  The "likelihood" of an identity match is by any means, no longer adequate.

Another system of age and identity verification, which is proving to be much more effective, is checking databases of government issued ID's.  Integrity is an online identity solution that was developed by Aristotle, constituting one of the most highly sought after identification services on the Web.  Rather than using credit bureaus, Integrity uses government issued forms of identification - such as voter records and driver licenses - from a database of 157 countries.  Since the match rate is considerably higher when checking government-issued identification, it is for these same reasons that airport security also requires government-issued picture ID's from boarding passengers.