What answer would you expect of Randi? “I don’t think so. [surprise] But the usage will change. In five or ten years I don’t see the users that often on facebook.com or twitter.com. These platforms will rather evolve into an identity or a passport to move around on the internet.” (freely translated from German).

Isn’t it very interesting how social networks build trust among their users? If you know 20 of my friends and they all list you as their friend, my trust in your digital identity is much higher than if you don’t know any of my friends. I think we have a big credibility problem in the current state of the web and I’m sure that social media will help to address this problem.

First let me explain why I think we miss trustworthiness.Whenever we read something we take the medium, the author and the content to judge if the provided information is trustworthy at all (that should happen before you decide if you like the content). On April the 1st, things might look a little different. If you have printed media in front of you, it’s pretty easy. Of course, they often write silly things too, but one newspaper has a better reputation over another and so on. In traditional media, this reputation has evolved over time and builds a foundation for trustworthiness. Why is that different from the Web? In my opinion, the main reason is the high reachability a completely anonymous (or faked) and thus not trustworthy identity can gain. I read dozens of blog posts, tweets, news articles, facebook pages, status updates and so on each and every day and in many cases I don’t have any idea of who the author really is. I must base my judgement on… well, on what? We might end up with the “size” of the source as a good factor, which leads back to big, non-transparent organizations.

Social networks build some kind of web of trust. And that is what leads me back to Randi’s answer above. Facebook obviously wants to become an identity provider platform in the long term. The basic idea is that with the interactions of their users they are able to establish trust in unique users. Isn’t this what we (information security people) always wanted? A huge web of trust where everybody participates? Whenever somebody sends a message, writes an article or a blog post, he should use an identity that provides some trust. As a consumer, I would like to see something like “the guy who wrote this piece of information has a trust level of 90%”. I should be able to decide myself about trust levels, e.g. I fully trust identities that are direct friends with me, I trust  identities to a degree of 80% that have 20 friends in common, and something like 40% when their social network consists of at least 50 reputable members of the social network (a.k.a. identity provider). And what is maybe most important: I will be able to blind out content that is not trustworthy at all. This may be all kinds of spam (except for companies that are loved by all my friends), commercial messages, tirades of anonymous trolls and a lot more.

We worked a lot on public key infrastructures (PKI) but they don’t seem to take off any soon. They are expensive, trust is complicated to establish and they got lots of technical complexities that no-one wants to care about. I don’t want to mix the establishment of trust with technical measures like signing bills with certificates, but hey, couldn’t social networks also integrate that technical functionality? I don’t know if I want facebook to be the leader in that matter, but I definitely like the idea of establishing trust through social interactions.

My intention was (and still is) to develop the idea further, but I just can’t find the time for it. I am interested in sharing my work and evolve the whole concept with somebody’s help, which is the main reason why I decided to release the paper (my bachelor thesis). I initially kept the paper confidential, but you can now find it on the list of bachelor theses of the FH HWZ.

• Knowledge Sharing
• Connect with existing friends
• Find new friends
• Find your better half
• Present yourself (& your friends)
• Share my lifestyle with others
• Extend Business Opportunities
• Indulge in reminiscences
• Enrich personal life

Of course, many of the social networks I analyzed belong to two or even more of these categories, e.g. there are many special intereset groups that would fit “Share my lifestyle with others” and “Find new friends”. Do you think there’s anything missing on this list?