Presence

Full Title or Meme

For Identity Management Presence typically refers to the human user acting through an agent to access a Web Site.

Context

• When discussing the use of the internet by a user, what is really meant is the Presence of the user operating an agent on an internet connection during some sort of Authentication process.

Problems

• From the time of the authentication with the agent forward, the user's Presence is seldom verified unless some individual action requires reconfirmation of the user's Presence, which may vary from a physical gesture on the screen to a test of some biological feature of the user.

Solutions

• User's physical gesture (touch, swipe, etc) on an input sensor of the device.
• Measurement of some biological feature (fingerprint, face scan) of the user.
• Sending some message to an alternate communications path (SMS phone message, etc).
• Some sort of Turing test (CAPTCHA, etc.)

Reference

Other Material

• An alternate use of the word Presence is to refer to all of the user's attributes spread across the internet.