Who owns your reputation?
If the title of this post was “Who should own your reputation?”, it would have made for a very short and boring read. You should own it — period. But we are not into writing short and boring posts — and once you think about it, the subject of who actually owns your reputation is pretty interesting.
First, reputation comes in many different shapes and sizes. One of its forms are the ratings and reviews you get on various online marketplaces like eBay or Airbnb or Uber. You’d think that these should belong to you — but they don’t. Instead, they belong to the marketplaces or platform where you got them. For example, you can’t take your Airbnb reputation to a different site to prove that you are a trustworthy person. This means that any time you open an account on a new site, you have to start from scratch. This is a little crazy — it is like going from California to Texas and finding out that your credit history didn’t carry over (we’ll get to credit reports in a moment).
What’s worse, is that if you ever decide to close your Airbnb account (or if Airbnb kicks you off for some reason), all the reputation you worked so hard to build is gone. To use the states example again, it is like moving from California to Texas and finding out that all your credit history has been wiped out. Clearly, it shouldn’t work like this. The ratings and reviews you receive on a marketplace should belong to you. You should be able to freely move them from one platform to another, and nobody should be able to take them away from you.
This brings us to credit reports. Unlike ratings and reviews on online marketplaces, your credit history is attached to you as a person. Your credit score is the same whether you are in California, Texas, or New York (if you go abroad, it’s a different story though). But even though it is attached to you, it doesn’t actually belong to you — it belongs to credit reporting agencies. There is a fascinating podcast from NPR that explains exactly how it works and how Credit Reporting industry evolved over the last 150 years: http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2017/10/06/556212654 (we highly recommend spending 20 minutes of your day listening to it).
The main point is that for credit reporting companies people are products — not customers. They collect information about us without our knowledge, and then sell this information to business (sometimes without our permission). Occasionally, they also get hacked on a massive scale as recently demonstrated by the Equifax debacle. Yes, you are entitled to 1 free credit report per year, and yes, you can pay a fee to the Credit Reporting company to “freeze” your credit report — but this doesn’t really qualify as “owning”.
This is a pretty sorry state of affairs. Your reputation is one of your most important assets, and it is clearly wrong that you don’t own big parts of it. It is so wrong, that some people would rather get rid of organized ways of tracking reputation than see it continue the way it is. We actually don’t think that’s a good solution. Keeping track of people’s reputation is very important for a well-functioning society. After all, if you don’t know who to trust, dealing with people becomes so much more difficult. Also, and perhaps more importantly, when reputation is involved, people tend to behave more honestly with each other.
But we don’t like the current state of affairs either — exactly because we believe you should own your reputation. Here is what this means:
1. No information should be gathered about you without your permission
2. Nobody should be able to access your reputation without your permission
3. Nobody should be able to take your reputation away from you
4. Only the people you’ve dealt with should be able to impact your reputation
5. You should be able to use your reputation in any interaction and on any platform
Here, at Credo360, we are building exactly such a system. Credo360 is completely opt-in — we don’t gather any information on you without your permission. Only the people you’ve had confirmed transactions with can write reviews for you (and you can write reviews for them). The reviews you get are private, and you are in complete control of who can see them. Our ultimate goal is for you to be able to use your reputation anywhere and everywhere you deem necessary to enable a more honest and efficient society.
This is our vision, and we would like to welcome any feedback that you might have on what other elements might be important for a truly open, decentralized, and secure reputation system.
