1. World Cup Tickets
I am going to France for a couple of weeks in September…”coincidently” during the Rugby World Cup. We confirmed our trip after all the legit tickets for matches I would like to see had sold out. But I’d like to go to a game… so I searched on Craigslist, found someone selling a ticket. Sent emails. She’s in San Fran … We’ve emailed. The thought crossed my mind, for about 2 seconds: hmm, it’s safe, right, to send money and wait for the tickets in the post? Surely this nice-sounding person isn’t a scammer. It was a back of the mind thought, nothing serious.
I did some Googling, found the seller’s blog. I read a little bit, checked out some pics of her family, her university friends… I don’t *know* her, but I trust her completely. Her presence on the web allows me to *know* with 100% certainty, that she is honest etc. And if she checks this blog, I expect she’ll see the same. So not the least little scrap of worry about doing a transaction on the web with someone I will likely never meet.
2. Amazon
I was recently contacted by Amazon.com about LibriVox. I did a web search on the name of the contact there, found the same name in a MySpace page for a band…didn’t think that could be her. But in our conversation she mentioned she was in a band, I said: “Is it so-and-so? Cause I’m looking at your Myspace page right now!” The conversation was different then … I knew, if nothing else, she was a hard working musician, and that helped me to trust her in a way I couldn’t have otherwise. The discussion may or may not continue, but we *know* each other in a way that makes it so much easier to discuss honestly now than if she was just a random name, representing a company I am wary of.
3. Fred
I posted about Vancouver 2010 copyright issues. “Fred Smith” left a comment, but no URL link. I read his comment, it sounded reasonable. But I cannot trust him, because there is no link to a web page where I can learn about who Fred Smith is. Does he exist? Does he work for the government? For a PR company? For the Vancouver 2010 committee? Is he an anarchist? A creative commons lawyer? No idea. He has no URL, and while I can take his words at face value, they have zero context, so I am hesitant to trust him. (No offense, Fred).
4. Problem at LibriVox
We are having a problem at LibriVox. The person in question has no digital identity that I know of. How am I give context to my evaluation of this person without more information online? I have nothing to go on.
SUMMARY:
If you don’t have a presence online, how can I know whether or not I should trust you?
Too true Hugh. This is something that so many people who are new to the internet don’t know. Sometimes you just KNOW about people, and can’t explain it. Even if you’ve never met them, and only had few exchanges, there are a few things that you can do to get a good gut feeling about them.
The converse of this would be that it is all too easy to create a persona or even several online and then use them for nefarious means.
As we become more net sophisticated, tho’, will we become better at spotting a fake web trail as we might when we meet someone face to face and assess whether they are assuming a persona or not.
@kristin: i think the main thing is being able to see some of the things they write about etc on their weblogs … i have a theory that much of what’s happening online is rebuilding the physical, small-scale social networks that we crave, but got destroyed in our modern/suburban/hypercommercial era. we don’t know our neighbours, we don’t know the people we buy from, we don’t know the people in the street. 50 or 100 years ago, it was different. digital identities allow us to *know* people in a way that people used to know people from their own town – even if they had never spoken or been close socially, everyone knew everyone, and could judge how they should interact…and now, with weblogs etc, to a certain extent that;s coming back, even for strangers.
@jim: while i know that’s possible, i think it would be difficult for someone to really create a phoney persona for reasons such as ripping off RWC ticket buyers…and the thing about the web: it’s always watching. If http://umor.co.uk/ were a fake, and I found out about it, I would probably write about it… the trouble flags would show in places like technorati and google. That doesn’t mean it won’t/doesn’t happen… it does mean, though, that pulling that off won’t be easy. IN the old days, confidence men went from town to town, once they were found out they were kicked out… now the internet is everywhere, and they’d have to keep reinventing their persona, but that takes time. again, smart people will figure it out, but there are many checks to what they can get away with.
I always kept my online presence to the absolute minimum, because I dreaded getting more spam. Once I accepted it as a fact of life, I loosened up a little.
[…] In Web we trust If you don’t have a presence online, how can I know whether or not I should trust you? […]
I feel pretty much the same way. Hope you don’t mind, but I sent it to Digg.
http://www.digg.com/security/Trust_on_the_web
Yes, but would you have felt the same if you came across someone with just an opinion based weblog and possibly pictures of places around town. One with very little personal information. I ask only because I have come across many online presences like that where I’m a bit hesitant to trust with my real world life.
It’s an amazing point that you have hit on. One advantage of the online community is that you gravitate towards like-minded people as opposed to your neighbors who are in your world because of location. Similar to the difference between friends who you seek out and family who you are stuck with.
@andre: thanks, i dug it – so now it’s you and me!
@frank: it depends a little on what the opinions were, or what the photos were like. it cuts both ways: i could just as easily land on the page of someone who seemed untrustworthy when I read his/her blog. the point is rather that digital presence allows us to evaluate people in a way that we cannot in any way except “getting to know someone.”
so digital presence does not imply trust, but it allows it.
oh and: i think the digital vs physical gravitation has plus and minus, but thinking of my world in Montreal, much of my digital trust actually applies to people who are in some sense neighbours. still, i worry that we pay too little attention to the “real world” and that’s dangerous, which is why things like barcamps and yulblog etc are great – we destroyed the physical connections people had to community; reinvented them online; and then brought them back to our physical communities. which is kinda cool.
Yeah, shows you how much power I actually yield over there.
What is the difference between saying:
A. I can trust them, I can see the kind of person they are from the web
and
B. I can trust them – they went to the same school/university as me.
or I know their family, or We belong to the same gym
I have been let down more often by people who deserved my trust in every way, than by strangers. But, anyway, there seems to be no shortcut to deciding on someone’s trustworthiness – even if you have known them for years.
And trusting someone based on their web presence seems akin to trusting someone because they belong to your own socio-economic group. A kind of digital country club.
“What is the difference between saying:
A. I can trust them, I can see the kind of person they are from the web
and
B. I can trust them – they went to the same school/university as me.
or I know their family, or We belong to the same gym”
not all that much, except that school and gym don’t imply much knowledge of the person, whereas an online presence can (sometimes) contain all sorts of information that is helpful in establishing what sort of person a stranger is (they sing in a choir, work in a lab at UCLA, hosted a halloween party (dressed as minimouse), volunteer with SPCA … etc. just sharing a gym or a school implies very little actual knowledge about a person. family probably a little more.
also there is the don’t tread on people in our shared circle idea – if you do something dishonest with me, then people at the gym/school/family are likely to hear about it. The web’s like that too: I will link to a jerk who does something bad online, to let people know about it.
but the point is that absent those other traditional contexts, a web presence allows me to know something about a person I would otherwise know nothing about.
“And trusting someone based on their web presence seems akin to trusting someone because they belong to your own socio-economic group. A kind of digital country club.”
I think that’s unfair.
I’m not saying that “if you have a blog I will trust you.” I’m saying, “if you have a blog, and I can read it and get a sense of who you are, I have a way of evaluating whether or not I should trust you.” If you don’t have a blog, then I have *nothing* to go on. rather than something.
the web itself *is* functionally exclusive and class-based, sure, but it’s still providing tons of good data that otherwise is absent, that lets me evaluate choices, about people, vacations, restaurants, books etc…but if the data I need is not online I have to get it some other way: in the case of deciding whether or not to trust a stranger, I have no data at all.
Yes, that was unfair. I apologise.
I had an epiphany some years ago. A man I had a lot in common with (background, music, one of the same group of friends) betrayed my trust in a quite spectacular way. And my group of friends were sympathetic, but certainly did not judge him. So I judged them, and left the group.
And someone I had always considered too dull to be of interest (not in my group, bad taste in music etc) really came through for me.
So, I decided to *try* and take people on what they *did*, rather than the face they chose to show me. To basically trust people until they did something undeserving of trust. Not much good when deciding whether or not to buy rugby tickets, I grant you, but it is the Way of LibriVox, or so it seems to me.
Also, I would hate to be judged by your criteria! I expect it would not give a faithful representation of my character. And I REALLY need to sell these tickets…
CH: “So, I decided to *try* and take people on what they *did*, rather than the face they chose to show me.”
HM: …right and to me reading what you write & post on a blog shows me things you have *done* … gives me data to work with.
CH: “Also, I would hate to be judged by your criteria! I expect it would not give a faithful representation of my character. And I REALLY need to sell these tickets…”
HM: well, firstly reading readear i’d certainly get a sense of who you are. but again, the point is available data: if you are not supplying good data online, then I have no way of evaluating you if i don’t know you some other way. if i’ve got data i can make a decision about trust.