Is transparency good for trust?

The amount of information the internet has on you is scary. And it is not just that it exists somewhere out there, but how easily it can be found. If you’ve ever used a “people search” site, you know what we are talking about. If not, well, you might develop a slight sense of paranoia in the next few minutes.

Case in point: www.familytreenow.com — go and try it out (it’s free). Results will vary, but for me, it brought up an awful lot of information that I thought was not so easy to come by. Names of my closest relatives, places I lived in over the last 10 years, phone numbers I used — everything was right there. FamilyTreeNow stands out a bit because their reports are free — but there are plenty of other sites which, for a prohibitive fee of $15, will find even more info on you (www.intelius.com, www.mylife.com and many more).

There is a reason why such sites exist though: people want to know if they can trust someone they need to deal with. And such sites cater to this need — plug in someone’s name, pay a small fee, and get a report. However, we think there are several problems with such approach.

First, it implies that a stranger must know your full name to look you up. On the one hand, if you have a super generic name — the service is useless — there will be too many matches. On the other hand, if your name is somewhat unique, revealing your full name to a complete stranger may put you at significant risk — precisely because of the wealth of information that can be obtained by knowing it. We, actually, never recommend sharing your full name with a stranger — and that’s why, on Credo, your last name is always private by default.

Second, while the amount of information that someone can get on you is staggering, very little of it can be used to figure out if you are a credible person. Sure, someone can find out the names of your children, places you lived in, companies you worked for etc. — but can any of that be really used to figure out how trustworthy you are? To be fair, many “people search” sites will check your public and criminal records — but, there are plenty of dishonest people out there with no red flags in either.

Third, most “people search” sites are passive. You don’t interact with people there and you can’t affect their reputation. So, if things don’t work out, you can’t let other people know to be careful when dealing with someone. Conversely, if everything works out great, you can’t recommend the person to others he/she might deal with in the future. This is actually a big problem — because there is no benefit for people to deal honestly with each other (if I know you can’t affect my reputation, I might be more inclined to be dishonest with you).

With Credo, we’ve taken a different approach. We believe that privacy — not transparency — should be the foundation of trust. We don’t think anyone should know the details of your personal life to know whether you are a credible person. With Credo, you can figure out if you can trust someone without knowing who the person is (and you can do that for free). You don’t need to know their full name, date of birth, location etc. — you can look at their Credo Score to form an immediate judgment. Of course, you can dig deeper into the person’s profile, if you’d like — but Credo will never reveal any personally identifiable information about you to other users (unless you explicitly share it). For example, looking at your profile people will be able to tell that you have a Facebook profile with 500 friends — but we will never share the link to your profile.

Most importantly, however, Credo is not a passive platform. You can deal with people on Credo — chat, make agreements, conduct transactions, and provide feedback — all of this in a trusted environment with your identity protected. The benefits of this are twofold: first, it “self-selects” honest people onto the platform — crooks will have little benefit in using Credo. Second, such a setup incentivizes people to behave honestly with each other. Meaning, that people who otherwise might have tried to bend the corners now and then, would now behave more honestly as they would care about their reputation.