Category Archives: Trust

Trust Vs Accountability

Interesting commentary in the Washington Post today titled ‘the decline of trust‘ by op-ed columnist Sebastian Mallaby:

In 1995 Francis Fukuyama came out with a book called “Trust,” in which he argued that a society’s capacity for cooperation underpins its prosperity. The same year, Robert Putnam’s famous article, “Bowling Alone,” lamented that the United States was depleting its stock of precious social capital. The question of trust — in government and also in communities — preoccupied politicians too. “It Takes a Village,” Hillary Rodham Clinton urged in the title of her 1996 book, which became a best seller.

You don’t hear much about trust these days. Instead, we want accountability.

…

There are powerful reasons trust tends to decline and accountability advances. Mobile societies tend to have weak bonds; the Internet makes it easier to hold people accountable and encourages acerbic negativity. And the absence of trust can feed on itself. Leaders function under stifling oversight; this causes them to perform sluggishly, so trust continues to stagnate. But occasionally there is a chance to escape this trap: A shock causes trust to rise, leaders have a chance to lead and there’s an opportunity to boost trust still further.

Interesting dynamics these and it sounds about right. Trust gives an opportunity to establish more trust and lack of trust begets more reasons to not trust…and shock events cause the pendulum to swing from one side to another. What do you think?

What is reputation?

There has been a lot of discussion about how to define and operationalize reputation for on-line communities. Bob Blakley in his beautifully written post – On the Absurdity of Owning One’s Identity – defines reputation as follows:

Your reputation is my story about you. You can’t own this by definition; as soon as you own it, it’s no longer my story about you; it instantly becomes an autobiography instead of a reputation.

James Kobielus has a different take on what reputation is:

Reputation isn’t an attribute of our identity, and it isn’t a story, really. It’s simply an assurance, confidence, or comfort level in which others regard our identity. It’s a vague, qualitative, holistic, often semi-conscious impression, calculated somewhere in the reptilian mind that has descended to us down through the ages. Quoting myself again:
…
“Relying parties—-the ultimate policy decision and enforcement points in any interaction—-need many levels of assurance if they’re going to do business with us. They gather assertions and data from many IdM “authorities” (authentication authorities, attribute authorities, etc.) before rendering their evaluations and opening their kimonos. They—-the relying parties—-make reputation evaluations based on information fed in from trusted authorities, from their own experiences with us, from whatever reputation-relevant data they can google across the vast field of received opinion and public record.”
Reputation is a computed halo—positive or negative–around our socially contextualized identities.
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Reputation is a score computed by relying parties in order to determine whether or not to authorize the reputed party to access resources such as jobs, communities, romantic encounters, time of day, etc.
Reputation is an assurance that someone is worth our while.

This is an interesting take although it almost seems like James is defining the process of generating and evaluating trust based on reputation rather then reputation itself. Phil Windley et al in the paper “A Framework for Building Reputation Systems” have a multi-faceted definition of reputation

Reputation is one of the factors upon which trust is based. The is much confusion between trust and reputation. We consider reputation a building block for trust. We are not concerned in this paper with what other factors go into trust, how trust is built, or how trust is exchanged.

Reputation is someone else’s story about me. I can’t control what you say about me although I may be able to affect the factors you based your story on. Every person should be able to have their own story about me.

Reputation is based on identity. Reputation, as someone else’s story, isn’t part of your identity, but is based on an identity or set of identities.

Reputation exists in the context of community. Any given context will have specific factors for what is important in determining reputation. This is different than saying “communities have a reputation about someone.” Communities do not have beliefs, only people have beliefs including beliefs about what others believe.

Reputation is a currency. While you can’t change reputation directly, reputation can be used as a resource. For example, Paul Resnick et. al. has shown the value of a positive eBay reputation [Res00a].

Reputation is narrative. Put another way, reputation varies with time. Reputation is dynamic because the factors that affect it are always changing. Reputation may require weaving together plot lines from different contexts.

Reputation is based on claims (verified or not), transactions, ratings, and endorsements.. How these factors are used in determining reputation is up to each individual. Individuals may use various evidence in making claims or proposing a certain rating or endorsement. The penalty for making false claims or giving false endorsements varies from context to context.

Reputation is multi-level. A reputation isn’t just based on facts, but is also based on other’s beliefs about the target of the reputation. These beliefs are signaled to others in various ways depending on the context.

Multiple people holding the same opinion increases the weight of that opinion. Reputation systems should have some way of weighting scores. As a related issue, repeat behavior is another way of weighting reputation.

Most of these points make a lot of sense…Reputation is really a key ingredient for establishing trust…and trust really is grease to the wheels of commerce and social interactions. Reputation is more then sum total of a person’s transactions on sites like eBay, it is really more of a person’s interactions in various communities.

One of the other characteristics of reputation, which is not captured in any of the definitions, is that reputation can be transferred. E.g. if a high reputation person recommends a particular person, it improves the reputation of the recommended. It’s almost like the recommended person can bask in reflected glory of the high reputation recommender. We should know, as we are in the process of approaching a number of people for help with our startup. In this process, one of the key things we think about is, what is the best way to approach and get introduced to the target, such that we maximize our potential for success. It will be interesting to see on-line reputation systems account for this critical characteristic of reputation.

Jigsaw Data

Interesting article in the SF Chronicle about Jigsaw Data, a company with an unusual social network for buying and selling business contacts:

Here’s how Jigsaw works: You can pay a subscription of $25 per month to access the database or you can enter 25 contacts per month. Members get two contacts back for each one they enter. All information is entered anonymously.

It seems like they are expecting strong growth:

Since it started operations on Jan. 1, 2004, Jigsaw has amassed a database of 3 million contacts at 150,000 companies, and the company expects that to grow to 5 million by year’s end. Only 131 of its 105,000 members sell points, Fowler said. “Almost all trade data to get data.”

It just seems like the wrong way to build a social network. Getting your contact added to Jigsaw feels like a breach of trust…A typical way your contact can get into Jigsaw is – you send a communication to a professional contact, who in turn, sells your information to Jigsaw (similar to somebody selling your information to a spammer). Sure you can opt out if you like, but I would rather have an explicit opt-in mechanism.

Anyone, even nonmembers, can go to the site to see if they’re listed. If they are, they can set parameters for how they wish to be contacted. A person could even say: “Never contact me.” Fowler’s own guidelines tell people never to call his mobile phone, keep e-mails short and not pitch wealth management or other financial services.

I guess the basic assumption that Jigsaw is making is that all professionals, just because they are employed, are going to want to be contacted by other professionals. I personally can see the value of sharing my contact information with people in the same field. But I can imagine other people who will object. Also who is going to make sure that information is not misused? What is there to prevent Jigsaw from becoming a super data base for spammers?

There is also a valid question about the quality of the data, raised by Bob Blakley in his post on the subject along with his new business card (:-)):

BTW, check out if you are in Jigsaw here.

Pretexting and social engineering

Great summary from Kim Cameron of the NPR show on pretexting and privacy issues brought froth by HP spying scandal (originally from Craig Burton)…Pretexting is a problem that will be there as long as there is profit to be made by pretending to be somebody else. In real world communities, short of DNA profiling or a chip planted into each human being, there is not much that can done to eliminate it. And even then enterprising social engineers/pretexts will find a way to pretend to be somebody else.

As with all new technologies that facilitate communication, there is a price to be paid in terms of increase in pretexting. The advent of phones brought in a wave of new pretexting scams (Kevin Mitnick does a good job of documenting them in “The Art of Deception“) and the same is now true of Internet. So what is the solution? How do on-line communities handle rampant pretexting?

I do not believe there are any silver bullets to deal with this issue. Technologies like info-cards help in providing ease of use for managing identities (its a big problem) along with some good encryption mechanisms to make it harder for pretexters to steal identities. But anytime there is a fixed set of credentials (like name, SSN, Credit card etc.) that are used to establish identity, pretexters will be able to deploy clever techniques (albeit with a bit more difficulty) to collect these credentials. Another approach is to rely on more decentralized identity mechanism shared in a tight knit community. Establishing identity in such communities will not only require a user to have the right credentials but also have an understanding of all the old interactions including the shared context with the community members. This will not stop pretexters but will make their job a whole lot harder.

Introducing KarmaWeb

BIO
Jitendra has over 15 years of experience in software technology. He started his career as a software engineer in the EDA industry. In 2000, after his MBA, Jitendra joined Siebel systems as product manager for Siebel web platform – the platform used for all Siebel application to the web. When he left Siebel in April 2005, he was managing a team of 4 product managers and 3 product lines. In May 2005 Jitendra joined InQuira as director product management. At InQuira, he managed the company’s flagship search product. In his role, Jitendra set the course of product development and participated in closing a number of sizable deals.

Jitendra obtained his MBA degree from University of Chicago in 2000 and his B.Tech degree in EE from IIT Kanpur in 1993. At Chicago, he developed and marketed chibus.com, the on-line edition of university of Chicago GSB school paper. He won the best PM award in PM group at Siebel for his efforts on the initiative to make the Siebel architecture more flexible.

Update 5/20/2009: Jitendra started (late 2006) and sold (March, 2009)  SezWho – an online reputation service for social media participants. In the process Jitendra raised $1.3 M in VC money, built up massive distribution, met a lot amazing people, did some innovative deals and all in all had a blast…