Summary: In this post, I review some of the ways that trust is earned online, including voting, feedback, human editors and inbound links. Why don’t we have mechanisms like these to measure the trustworthiness of companies?

Bruno Giussani published some notes recently from a conference in Amsterdam, including this comment from Wall Street Journal tech columnist Walt Mossberg:

There is a digital tidal wave that changes every walk of life, every business, every part of the society. The question of this session is: how can we tell who has authority in today’s world?

So far 100% of the people who’ve voted in yesterday’s poll prioritize trust over privacy.

Trust is critical. Authority is critical. But why do we need to trust companies? Here are a few thoughts:

• We have to trust that the companies we give our information to won’t ever make a mistake and accidentally release it to the public, such as my recent experience when Lingo gave me the email addresses of 14,000 customers.
• We have to trust that the companies we give our information to are not conducting activities in such a way as to expose them to subpoenas.
• We have to trust that the digital security mechanisms they have in place are sufficient to prevent malicious access.
• We have to trust that the company itself doesn’t have any malicious or undesired intent.

Those are pretty heavy burdens of proof for online companies, and most are highly difficult to prove—I mean, seriously, how many consumers have the faintest idea of the digital security mechanisms that Facebook does or doesn’t have in place?

The actual process is similar to voting for president. You can’t know in advance every issue that might come up during a presidency, so you decide if you trust the person as a whole based on your individual impressions. The hope is that you can count on someone to do the right thing even if you have no idea of the future circumstances that person will face.

Wouldn’t it be nice, though, if there were some way of measuring trust in companies? It shouldn’t be too hard.

Right now, we’ve got some decent, explicit methods for indicating the trustworthiness of sources:

• Votes: Sites like Digg and StumbleUpon use a voting system to try to get the cream to rise to the top.
• Feedback: eBay and their Kiwi counterpart TradeMe use a feedback rating system to increase buyer confidence.
• Human editors: Slashdot relies on a human-powered filtering process to ensure only good stories make it to the site.
• Inbound links: The lifeblood of Google and the bane of any new site-owner’s existence. Technorati also relies on these for its rankings.

Even though we all know that they can be gamed, these methods are still useful as an indicator of website or page quality. But there’s no such thing for companies, really; no standardized, democratized eBay-type rating system that allows users to share their experiences with each other.

Do you think such a thing would be useful to have? And what would be the best way to implement it—how should it work so that it doesn’t get gamed, either by consumers or by the company itself?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 16th, 2007 at 3:26 am and is filed under Trust. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.