Bob Blakley had a great "live" interview on Forum One.
It builds on the interview that I had a few weeks ago with them. The format is quite interesting - many people ask questions by typing them and you type your answers at the time of the interview.

Bob highlighted - The most serious question we're facing - and really it trumps all the others - is "how do identity providers make money"?

Johannes picks up on this serious problem and explains why they pulled back from their public OpenID provision.

Bob is asked what is the biggest threat to identity?

That's a really interesting question. In the past, we had the sense that our identities arose from our status as human persons. I think the biggest threat to our identities today is that as a society we might fall into the trap of reversing this relationship, and come to believe (or at least act as if we believe) that our status as persons derives from possessing an electronic "identity" - that is, a record in a database.

If this happened we'd be in danger of becoming "unpersons" whenever someone erased our identity record in the database.

I worry about this happening. I have since first really experiencing being an entry in a database when I was a student at UC Berkeley.