Trying to solve the problem of trust.

Trust is a complex topic, being studied in academia in psychology and sociology. It is to a society as air since without trust, everything tears apart. As more and more of our society relies on online interactions, this gives rise to bad actors that take advantage of good people's trust. Even more so with the accessibility of AI systems that can easily impersonate a real person. We need a good solution to make sure that we interact with real people that we can trust.

Can we define "trust"?

Trust is the willingness of a party (the trustor) to be vulnerable to the actions of another party (the trustee) based on the expectation that the trustee will perform a particular action important to the trustor, irrespective of the ability to monitor or control the trustee.

This definition, which comes from the organizational scholars Roger Mayer, James Davis, and David Schoorman in their 1995 paper "An Integrative Model of Organizational Trust," emphasizes vulnerability, expectation, and inability to control the trustee (you can always trust someone when you hold a gun to his head).

Narrowing our scope down

We can classify trust in different ways:

• interpersonal trust (between individuals),
• institutional trust (in organizations or institutions),
• systemic trust (in systems or societies)

My solution targets the scope of "interpersonal trust" by dissecting it in some components as it arises from academic research.

Components of interpersonal trust

My operationalization of trust in a web based form is built on a 3 level pyramid shape:

• The base: Verified accountable identity:

  Holding the actors accountable to established organizations that can enforce punishment of illegal actions. This means that the actors should be identifiable and linked to an established organization with authority and jurisdiction to the actor. It simply means to have a hold of the person's ID documents emitted by an authorized entity as a means of illegal actions deterrence.

• Middle: Track-record of good intentions:

  future feature Being able to see that a person has a record of interactions with real persons that verify the good intentions of the person.

• Top: Qualifications:

  future feature There is a difference between having good intentions and being qualified for a specific "trade". However, without good intentions, not going into illegal territory, even if someone has perfect qualifications, it will end badly.

How trustnet.app works

Verified Identity Scoring

The verified identity is scored from 0 to 100. One can link social media accounts and an algorithm will rate the credibility of that profile (profile age, activity, etc) so that even without an Official ID, that person could still be trusted.

Legal Identity Federation

It's understandable that some people won't want to upload the official IDs. However, the only way to gain 100 credibility is to upload your own legally recognized ID issued by a nation-state. Once uploaded to our secure storage, it will be reviewed by a designated agent that will review and verify the document and the attributes in it such as the name, id number, citizenship, etc. All those attributes will only be visible and shareable by you. After the document verification is done the document is secured with an asymmetric master key so that it sits in complete safety in the storage.

The only case that the master key will be used to open an ID document is if someone raises a complaint with an official judicial organization (police) and that organization asks us for it.

The verified document badge will always stay on (as long as the document is still valid). Users can also securely store their own version of the document by securing it with a secret only known to the user. This way you can use TrustNet as a store for ID documents. future feature If someone asks for a copy of an ID, the user can send a secured special link that only the requester can open.

Personas

Personas are like personal pages for your multiple online "masks". Share for each exactly what you want. Have some public that anyone can access, protected, only available to logged in users, and private, for your eyes only.

Anonymity with Credibility

Can be both anonymous and enjoy 100% credibility.

Share Credibility Between Online Personas

Use one or more personas to group together multiple contacts, attributes, and social accounts. For example, have 1 persona for work and 1 persona for friends. The work persona has your LinkedIn, Github, and StackOverflow accounts while the friends persona has Instagram and Facebook. Once you validate a document they will both show that you are a 100% credible person.

Single Point for Online Identity Management

Hold your IDs securely here and share them as you please. A potential customer asks for your identity proof? Send them a link to one of your personas that show them your verified name and contacts. future feature A bank asks for your ID? Send them a secured link to it.

Future Features

Unified Ratings, Verified

It's a real waste to have ratings scattered across platforms. Each platform like Facebook Marketplace, Google maps, Amazon has its own rating system. it makes a seller that changes platform to lose them all. Import all valid and verified existing ratings to trustnet.app. Request for ratings to your customers easily, from the platform. They will get invited to write about your interaction. Verified users ratings really matter when building trust.

Rate Others Even If They're Not on Trustnet.app

Just by using someone's phone number or email, a user can rate an interaction with someone. This mechanism can become a service for defending against bad actors. Contact points (phones, emails) can be coupled with more points and eventually build a persona by how it interacts with others from trustnet.app. Dark matter is hidden but you can measure the disturbance it creates in order to detect it.

Qualifications

Create one or more online resumes and tie it up to your ratings. Resumes with validated ratings from real people. Wouldn't this create more trust in fully remote work contracts?