How Blockchain Empowers the Car Sharing Economy
The existence of sharing services such as Airbnb and Car Next Door has allowed everyday individuals to become “mini-entrepreneurs” and earn extra cash for their underutilised assets like cars, apartments and even power tools.
Car sharing serves as a fantastic way for the more eco-minded consumer to reduce their carbon footprint by switching from owning a car to simply only borrowing one when necessary.
But despite its rapid growth in prominence, car-sharing, as well as other forms of collaborative consumption, have yet to realise its full potential and continuing to expand is an uphill battle due to horror stories of unpunished neglect and vandalism circulating the media. These stories come from a minority of users exploiting community trust and only worsens the trust problem between the rest of the users in the car-sharing ecosystem.
Car-sharing companies such as Car Next Door have been trying to combat these trust issues by implementing a variety of mechanisms such as user verification and feedback systems for both the owner and the borrow, GPS systems and insurance policies. However, these mechanisms can only come into play in the event of a grievance and do not comprehensively address these trust issues.
After all, the main form of proof used when grievances and conflicts arise is by photographing the vehicle and attaching these photos in the complaint. This seems to be a no-brainer: cameras are easily accessible nowadays with the prominent use and ownership of smartphones.
However, the authenticity of the photo can be undermined if one party claims that the photo has been digitally altered or has had its metadata (location and timestamps) changed. This would also be a fair point: almost just as easy as it is to take a photograph of anything today, one can also simply download mobile applications on the same smartphones that allow for this evidence tampering. This means that photos have essentially lost their ability to prove events.
UPhoto is a blockchain photo verification camera app built to address this and, by doing so, give back power to the consumer. When you take a picture with UPhoto, the data from the camera lens is captured directly along with key metadata information such as file size, time taken, and location.
UPhoto creates a fingerprint of the digital file which is then recorded on the blockchain. The properties of blockchain mean that once this information is recorded, it can no longer be altered. This ensures that the authenticity of the image stays true to what was seen by the camera sensor at the moment of capture.
Photos taken and uploaded by UPhoto are guaranteed to be authentic, stored securely and tamper-proof once recorded onto the blockchain.
By giving photos its objectivity back, users of car-sharing platforms that recognise and utilise UPhoto’s innovative features can be confident that any grievance or complaint can be easily resolved.
