Mozilla on Thursday said that its upcoming identity service, now known as Mozilla Persona, will include such features as an identity dashboard as well as the capability to connect user data.

Mozilla on Thursday said that its upcoming identity service, now known as Mozilla Persona, will include such features as an identity dashboard as well as the capability to connect user data.

To date, Mozilla's identity efforts have been known as BrowserID, which will remain Persona's code name for developers, Mozilla said. Mozilla mentioned its identity efforts as part of a at the Mobile World Congress early next week.

"The Persona name resonates with the idea of personhood as well as online identity as a facet of our lives, and therefore strongly tied to user identity," Mozilla said in a blog post.

(The new Persona has nothing to do with the existing Mozilla Personas, which are ways to customize the look and feel of the Mozilla Firefox browser. Mozilla said recently that it would change the Personas name, but has not yet come up with a new brand.)

Mozilla sees Persona as an easy process. Users would need to sign up for the service with an email address, which would send them an email to be confirmed and verified. Then, on a supported browser, a website could display a "sign in" button that a user could click. When the user selected his email from a list, that user would be authenticated on the site itself. Persona would use a secure token to authenticate the user, so that he or she would never need to enter a password. The idea would be to give the user one password for all websites that support Persona, without the risk of that password being passed to the site itself and potentially lost.

Mozilla did not go into more detail about the Persona roadmap, described as a "collection of components and experiences." The company also did not give a timeline for the identity dashboard and the user data interconnect features, although the blog post referred to an "action-packed 2012 for our distributed Identity system."

Presumably, the identity dashboard would be a central site where users could monitor and review Persona's use across a variety of sites. It's not clear what "user data interconnect" means, although it may allow user data to be shared across Persona-enabled sites with the user's permission.