I’m all for making things easier for managing your logins and all, but is placing one site in the center of all your logins really a good idea? What happens when Yahoo! decides to make money from their advertisers by sending you targeted ads based on the sites you have been visiting?

The announcement this week by Yahoo that it is planning to test a beta version of its Yahoo ID that supports the OpenID 2.0 protocol has thrown a bright spotlight on the quickly growing online identity-management system.

As of Jan. 30, any of Yahoo’s 248 million users will be able to log in to OpenID-compatible sites using a special version of their Yahoo log-in. When Yahoo users go to a site using the OpenID protocol, they will either see a special Yahoo log-in field, or they can type “yahoo.com” into an OpenID field to start the log-in process. The Web site will redirect the user to Yahoo to log in, and then Yahoo will forward the user’s identifying information back to the Web site.

The net effect is that Yahoo users will only have to enter identifying information once — on Yahoo — rather than on multiple sites across the Web.

What happens when all of this “central” information is breached? What happens if… you get the point.

Like I said at the beginning, I am all for making things easier, but the question is, do you really trust Yahoo! to do it for you?

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