Many Internet standards body have tried to create the technical expression of trust in our online activities. From the W3C and ICANN to Blockchain, translating the very human element of trust into a technical formula has been stumped the best and brightest minds in technology today.
The core issue stems from the fact that “trust” is, technically, a befuddling mix of technologies, still unformed, a Jello-like confection, sliding about in slobbery mess.
Not that folks haven’t been trying mind you.
You have the semantic technology advocates working on contextually intelligent search engines.
You have social media engineers trying to distinguish between real and fake accounts.
You have the brightest minds at Google trying to discern real impressions from a fake one.
You have AI trying to figure out anything everything anyone is willing to throw money at.
Despite all the technological spaghetti thrown at the digital wall, trust in the online world remains confined to a few functions; eCommerce (sorta) and communications (mostly). Beyond these rudimentary functions, we are all left on our own:
- It’s hard to vet content you can trust
- It’s hard to verify “people” you can believes are real
- It’s hard to discover new ideas online given the technical preference for personalization
- It’s hard to detect digital vulnerabilities based on behaviors that could be damaging
- It’s hard to distinguish between “real” reviews and fake ones
- It’s impossible to manage your personal information in the digital world
No wonder trust online is so complex to create. It tests technology’s ability assess disparate data points into anything resembling a human’s ability to synthesize different ideas into something entirely new. Even today’s machine learning powered by AI has nowhere near the abilities of a three-year-old child.
If it were just a paradox, it would be an interesting intellectual thought experiment. But there’s more at stake here. What is required in equal measure to the technology is the introduction of the human element of trust by conforming digital society to be governed by the same principles as in the real world.
“Wait a minute,” I hear many of you thinking. “Who says I can’t trust the web? I do my banking online. I send e-mail. The web is plenty trustworthy — thank you very much. But offer me an internet that can show me how to buy that pimped-up iPhone and I’m there.”
That kind of thinking is exactly the problem. Technology adoption tends to ignore the human element until there is some disastrous trigger event that forces us to introduce protections around these new technologies. We must consider seriously how to transfer a trust infrastructure to the web world with new technologies around authentication, privacy, content management for everyone, ad management tools for “Judy Consumer,” ID management and security.
Yet innovation in these areas tend to lag because they are not seen as high profit relative to cost for development. Many of the technologies will require a tech breakthrough that make take years – defying current VC funding models of build fast and flip fast.
This is why, investment needs to change the time frame to allow technologies that are focused on creating trust a longer runway whether that be in advertising technology or identity management. These are prickly problems that defy easy answer because they require a merging of tech with the human element, and this is the only way the web can evolve to a trusted web.
