Our Approach

Solving the Reputation Problem is hard. For one, human behavior is so complex that figuring out how to “measure” reputation is a monumental task. But more importantly, the world where everyone’s reputation is measured and accessible to others seems like something right out of dystopian future.

So, when we set out to build our reputation system, we understood that we need to be extremely careful, and we started out with a core set of principles which we aligned everything else with. These principles are:

• Your identity should belong to you — nobody should be able to find out who you are without your permission
• Your reputation should belong to you — nobody should be able to see your reputation without your permission, and nobody should be able to take your reputation away
• Your reputation should reflect your past interactions — only the people who you’ve interacted with should have a say in your reputation

Starting with the last principle first: the way our system works is by letting people rate and review each other (just like you currently can on AirBnB, eBay etc.). The important thing is that you can only rate and review the people you have interacted with. And not all ratings and reviews are equal. In fact, we’ve put a lot of thought into determining the value of each rating. For example, a rating from a person whom you barely know, is not weighed as much as a rating received from someone who you’ve interacted with often.

We also want the ratings to be as honest as possible. So, we made them fully confidential. This means, that no one, not even the person you rate, will see what you think of them. The ratings you receive, together with a few other factors, are aggregated into a Reputation Score. This Reputation Score is somewhat similar to a Credit Score. But unlike credit score, it goes beyond your likelihood to pay your debts — it is a measure of how trustworthy you are in the eyes of people you’ve dealt with in the past.

Moving to the second principle, that “your reputation should belong to you,” the reviews you receive from other people are fully private. They are only visible to you and the people who wrote them. You have full discretion over who you show your reviews to. This part also works somewhat similar to Credit Reports in the U.S. — others must ask you for permission before they can see your Credit Report — same with our Reputation Reports. The caveat here is that you can’t pick and choose which reviews to show — you either don’t show your reviews or you show all of them.

Lastly, we strongly believe in privacy. Let’s face it, our world can be dangerous and we don’t want strangers to know any extra details about us. This is why we designed our system with privacy as a central tenet. You have full control over how much personal information you reveal. We only ask you to reveal your true first name — everything else, such as your age, last name, and profile photo, can be hidden.

The real beauty of the system is that it allows people to build and share their reputation while being nearly anonymous. When you connect with me via the Credo360 Reputation Platform, the only thing you know about me is my first name and my Reputation Score — but that should be sufficient, in most cases, to figure out whether you can trust me and how cautious you need to be when dealing with me.