Who do you trust? How data is helping us decide

Rachel Botsman – The Guardian

A remarkable proportion of the infrastructure of a modern state is there to compensate for the absence of trust. We need to establish identity, establish creditworthiness, have a legal system to deal with broken promises, employ police officers, security guards and locksmiths, all because we don’t know whether we can trust one another. Most of us, as it happens, are pretty trustworthy. But a few of us aren’t, and it’s really hard to work out which category each of us fall into (to say nothing of the fact that it’s partly situational, so people don’t stay neatly in one or the other).

There are some pretty obvious opportunities for big data to be brought to bear on all that, and this article focuses on a startup trying to do exactly that. That could be a tremendous way of removing friction from the way in which strangers interact, or it could be the occasion for a form of intrusive and unregulated social control (it’s not enough actually to be trustworthy, it’s essential to be able to demonstrate trustworthiness to an algorithm, with all the potential biases that brings with it) – or it could, of course, be both.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.