Who are you?
Check out Honesty Online — they sell digital certificates that help you to prove that you are who you say you are, online. How it works is you enter some personal details and a credit card number. They do a background check on you, and fish up some information that only you should know. Then you get randomly quizzed on this information. If you pass, you get to buy a certificate that verifies your identity. I think it only works for people who live in the US.
Their main targets seem to be users of social networking sites and online dating. I can see that it could be quite useful for online dating. I’m not so sure about social networks, I think your network of friends is already a pretty good signal of your credibility. It could also be useful on reputation-based sites, like eBay, for initial users who don’t yet have a reputation to trade on.
One issue is that many people may wonder about whether the certificates can be faked. Similar to certificates used for secure e-commerce servers, an elaborate encryption scheme is used to make certificate faking virtually impossible. However, I wonder whether many people can fully appreciate this feature and understand how the encryption works so that they can trust it. Worries about e-commerce security is a major factor that prevents people from shopping online.
(HT: Web 2.Oh … Really?)
2 Comments
Trust is always an issue, but do you personally think that people will have enough incentive to actually pay for a service like this? In other words, does the pain justify the price?
Ahmed: Good point, obviously it depends on the price they charge. I couldn’t actually find any prices on Honesty Online’s website! However, if I were into online dating, I think I would be willing to pay a (small) fee for this kind of service.