blg@bgreenaway.com's sandbox: Semi-Anonymous user

Semi-anonymous user is an interoperability extension for external authentication. Data you wish to store remotely from the Drupal database about users in an external authentication configuration is made available and usable for other modules without needing to be recorded in the users table.

Semi-anonymous user creates real, temporary users in Drupal for Drupal to associate with your external data but it does not give those users any of your external data. $_SESSION and {session} only are used, not {users} and the data persists only as long as your php session ID. Then the semi-anonymous user implements hook_user() to retrieve it's session data, making it available in the global user for other modules to use. You can use this module's functions to present profile and custom, personal information which can not, or should not reside in Drupal's database safely to the Drupal user as if it did.