The Liberty Alliance, a group formed to develop technology standards for online authentication, on Tuesday released guidelines for organizations adopting federated identity management technologies. The guidelines (download PDF) were developed to help tackle the business and policy issues involved in building the legal and contractual frameworks needed to share identities between members of a federation, the Liberty Alliance said.

The guidelines were drawn up by the Liberty Alliance's Public Policy Expert Group, which includes representatives from BIPAC, the US General Services Administration, Oracle and Sun Microsystems. They cover what type of personal data will be shared among federation members, how and when it will be shared and what security procedures will be used to maintain the confidentiality of such information, among other issues, the Liberty Alliance said.