This kind of centralization increases potential privacy concerns. Also, such cooperative registering suggests a system in which individuals would have one certificate for all purposes. If standards are to be developed to operationalize the principles, common standards should apply to all CAs that deal with individual consumers. Ideally, regulated standard contracts between CAs and consumers would be developed. Individual consumers always face a power imbalance in dealing with major corporations and thus need some protection whether the model is open or closed.
Standards are only effective if they include an adequate compliance component.
Government PKI Public key authentication could become very important for government services delivery in the future. The computerization of health records, for instance, may require public key methods of authentication. Public key authentication can only be meaningfully promoted to consumers in the context of some assurance that the new systems will not be privacy invasive, and will not involve significant new liabilities for consumers. How individual interests will be affected by implementation of public key authentication needs to be well understood before principles for authentication are developed. Also, there is a need to develop a clear, non-technical explanation of digital authentication and PKI so that a wider audience can participate in discussions about it.