Who’s Who? What’s What? What’s Real In An Internet world? « pwc.com / innovate

Who’s Who? What’s What? What’s Real In An Internet world?

December 1, 2009 ·

The New Yorker published a cartoon in 1993 which shows a dog sitting at a computer terminal saying to another dog, “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.”  A few years ago, I went to a talk given by one of the computer graphics experts who worked on Jurassic Park.  He was describing how they created many of the dinosaurs in the movie completely by computer.  He went on to say that within a decade, they will be able to create human beings on film completely by computer without any need for actors.  The power of Photoshop to recreate photographic reality is seen as magazines are caught digitally manipulating photos to meet their needs.

Over 15 years after the original New Yorker cartoon, there is still no widely deployed mechanism for verifying the identity of anyone or authenticity of anything found on the web.  As the web becomes the primary source of information for more and more of the world’s populace, it becomes harder and harder to discern truth from fiction.  The question is, “How do you know who to trust?”

Over time, as technology has evolved, new trust models have been developed to keep up.

  • Recommendations through friends – This is perhaps the oldest method of establishing trust.  You simply ask someone you trust for a recommendation, e.g. you move to a new city and ask a colleague to recommend a doctor or attorney.  You believe a story because someone you know and trust tells it to you.
  • Recommendations through trusted third parties – Restaurant, movie, or wine reviews in a newspaper are examples of this model.  Because you trust the judgment of the reviewer you trust their recommendations.  Gartner reports on IT products and vendors, and their ratings of consulting firms are an example of how effective this can be.
  • Process creates trust – Traditional journalism requires the validation of a story from more than one source.  You believe what you read in the New York Times because you trust the vetting process they use before they print a story.  Wikipedia is also an example of this trust model.  You trust the contents of Wikipedia because you believe that the “crowd sourcing” process used is effective.
  • Community ratings – Zagat guides demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach.   Rather than depending on a single trusted 3rd party, you simply aggregate the opinions of a large number of people and use that as a recommendation.  Based on their success with restaurants, Zagat has extended their model to hotels, nightlife, movies, music and now even dating (& dumping).  This model has been dramatically extended on the Web to everything from local repair people to attorneys and doctors.
  • Reputation systems – eBay’s trust model is perhaps the most novel.  With most eBay transactions, an auction winner sends payment to a completely unknown seller when the auction completes.  The seller then ships the product to the winner.  There is no formal recourse if the product does not meet the buyer’s expectations or even to complain if the seller never ships the product at all.  Within eBay, there is a system of community reputation in which buyers rate sellers.  For a prospective buyer, a seller with a high reputation score has lots of satisfied customers and therefore can be trusted.

However, as web information continues to explode and search engines now provide results which include Twitter and Facebook, clearly a new trust model is needed.  Recently David Pogue, the respected New York Times columnist, was accused of a conflict of interest by a number of Twitter posters.  One such Twitter post was from a Twitter user with the name “John C. Dvorak”, which also happens to be the name of another well respected computer journalist.  David Pogue gave an interview about the incident and took John Dvorak to task for his Twitter posts.  Unfortunately, the Twitter poster was not the computer journalist John C. Dvorak but someone else with the same name.  The journalist actually posts under the Twitter name “TheRealDvorak” and had made no comment at all about Pogue.  In this case even Pogue, an experienced New Times Reporter, didn’t realize he had mistakenly assumed he knew who the post was from.

Twitter has responded to the growing problem of mistaken identity by providing a program which tries to verify the identity of some Twitter users.   Unfortunately, the program is limited to a very small number of celebrities, and given the rate at which Twitter is growing and the company’s limited resources, this problem will likely grow as more and more people believe what they read on Twitter.

Solving this problem is one of the great challenges which will require significant new innovations to solve.  If you can’t tell who’s who, or what’s what on the internet, its value as an information repository will start to diminish.

Author: Sheldon Laube, Chief Innovation Officer

Categories: Information Security · Society · Trust