11–16 of 16 posts
It's an interesting idea and I was with him until he said the government should be involved to enforce this. The government doesn't regulate any meaningful relationships in my life so why should it regulate who I decide to trust? Seems like a fantasy to even suggest that it could do so.
CouchSurfing provides enough trust data that you'll have someone into your home based on a web profile. Some of the mechanisms include personal references, friend lists, community awards (that are meaningful and hard to get), and unrevokable vouches.
For the large part, such a trust network already exists with Facebook. Yes, it's not perfect, and yes, it probably can be better, but when you want some form of trust it's usually very powerful to use Facebook Connect to allow a user to see another user's FB profile. I've been recently involved in creating a site for sports meetups (like, say, for a casual game of tennis), and FB Connect came up pretty early on in ou…
For the large part, such a trust network already exists with Facebook. Yes, it's not perfect, and yes, it probably can be better, but when you want some form of trust it's usually very powerful to use Facebook Connect to allow a user to see another user's FB profile. I've been recently involved in creating a site for sports meetups (like, say, for a casual game of tennis), and FB Connect came up pretty early on in ou…
Trust networks are too important to leave in the care of one company.
It's an interesting idea and I was with him until he said the government should be involved to enforce this. The government doesn't regulate any meaningful relationships in my life so why should it regulate who I decide to trust? Seems like a fantasy to even suggest that it could do so.
Really? so you don't have any "meaningful relationships" that involve contracts, laws, things like that? You don't drive a car? Use a phone? Benefit from Police and Fire protection? Those things are all government regulated. Really when you think about it, government has a lot to do right now with regulating trust. Think of how much more difficult trust between businesses would be if contracts didn't have the force o…
I don't want a relationship with the police department, the fire department and I don't see a purpose for the government to regulate phones.
Then there is also the issue that contracts can be voided if the government decides to.
It's an interesting idea and I was with him until he said the government should be involved to enforce this. The government doesn't regulate any meaningful relationships in my life so why should it regulate who I decide to trust? Seems like a fantasy to even suggest that it could do so.
I agree that government shouldn't take an active role in running the system, but protecting the system by preventing abuse seems like a good fit. Maybe something very similar to the way government enforces contracts.
The other, perhaps more important, role is in creating and enforcing standards. (This role might emerge naturally from the results of research.) There must be a defined set of features that anyone providing a "trust network client" has to implement. Preferably such standards would include a provision that requires providers to let users package up their "trust data" and take it to another provider, with a guarantee that the original provider would not maintain it. (After all, you might decide that you don't trust your provider!) Otherwise, it will be the same old story: every private entity in the game will want to control their users' data, and prevent them from going elsewhere. Any moderately successful trust network will be incompatible with the others, and even those that become popular will live and die with the entities behind them.
Imagine if the Internet had been built like that.