“Kim Cameron and Craig Burton have been big proponents of a new identity technology intended to replace the cookie. It’s called “the Selector”. The idea of the Selector is that you, the user, use Information cards in a manner allowing you to fully control the experience you have as you peruse the web. The idea uses an extension to information cards, called “action cards“, which enable users and consumers to specify their own preferences as to who shows them data and when around the web. The cool thing is that businesses have a part in this as well that the users can opt into.” - × × ×

He couldn't believe what he'd just found. He slowly drew out from the wallet a single and insanely exciting piece of plastic that was nestling amongst a bunch of receipts. It wasn't insanely exciting to look at. It was rather dull in fact. It was smaller and a little thicker than a credit card and semi-transparent. If you held it up to the light you could see a lot of holographically encoded information and images buried pseudo-inches deep beneath its surface . It was an Ident-i-Eeze, and was a very naughty and silly thing for Harl to have lying around in his wallet, though it was perfectly understandable. There were so many different ways in which you were required to provide absolute proof of your identity these days that life could easily become extremely tiresome just from that factor alone, never mind the deeper existential problems of trying to function as a coherent consciousness in an epistemologically ambiguous physical universe. Just look at cash point machines, for instance. Queues of people standing around waiting to have their fingerprints read, their retinas scanned, bits of skin scraped from the nape of the neck and undergoing instant (or nearly instant — a good six or seven seconds in tedious reality) genetic analysis, then having to answer trick questions about members of their family they didn't even remember they had, and about their recorded preferences for tablecloth colours. And that was just to get a bit of spare cash for the weekend. If you were trying to raise a loan for a jetcar, sign a missile treaty or pay an entire restaurant bill things could get really trying. Hence the Ident-i-Eeze. This encoded every single piece of information about you, your body and your life into one all-purpose machine-readable card that you could then carry around in your wallet, and therefore represented technology's greatest triumph to date over both itself and plain common sense. - Michael Bravo

from "Mostly Harmless", the fifth book in the HHGTTG trilogy by Douglams Adams - Michael Bravo