Facebook – a portable identity system for the sharing economy?

An early blog post by Francesca Pick — June 25, 2012.

As I recently wrote about in my article on Shareable.net, trust is a crucial element of transactions between users of peer-to-peer (P2P) platforms. The growing popularity of online marketplaces that enable the sharing and swapping of assets, skills, and experiences over the Web — such as Getaround, TaskRabbit, or Gidsy — has made the importance of trust ever more evident. As collaborative consumption moves from a niche business to a mainstream phenomenon, a number of companies are trying to tackle the trust and safety issues that arise when users transact online. Start-ups such as Briiefly, Connect.me, TrustCloud, Peertru.st, Scaffold, and Tru.ly are attempting to do this by creating universal trust systems for the Web that aggregate social, transactional, and personal data from social networks and other sources.

A trust system cannot be based solely on reputation data. “Is this person who he says he is?” is probably one of the first questions one would ask before transacting with a stranger on the Web. So the foundation of a functioning trust system must be some type of portable online identity that clearly links a user’s actions to a specific person — otherwise users can be neither rewarded for good behavior nor held accountable for misconduct. This is why Peertru.st is working on real-person identity verification before adding a layer of social data to their trust system. Bondsy has taken a different approach, building a mobile app that lets users tap into their existing social networks to share, barter, and trade with their first- and second-degree contacts — solving the identity problem by only letting users transact with people they already know or are in their network.

When I started working on online identity for my bachelor thesis, it struck me that an excellent candidate for a portable identity system already exists: Facebook. Some users may use pseudonyms on the social networking site, but the majority sign up with their real name. Most users also voluntarily upload pictures of themselves and provide a large amount of other personal data, such as place of birth, relationship status, and education. A person’s friends and posts reveal information about social circles and behavior. Isn’t this the perfect basis for an identity system?

Facebook Connect turns personal profiles into portable identities. The app lets users log onto third-party websites and applications with their Facebook account. What I find most revolutionary about this is that Facebook Connect enables users to act in a familiar environment anywhere on the Web by providing social context on a foreign website. No matter if you’re on a site for clothes swapping or meal sharing, the app makes it easy to share with friends also using the service — creating a familiarity that is key to gaining users’ trust.

As the largest and most-used social networking site on the Web, Facebook also has two things start-ups building trust systems still lack: critical mass and large amounts of user data. Just imagine how many Facebook members would instantly start using an optional trust score displayed on their profile if one were introduced! Since one of the toughest challenges trust start-ups face is convincing the online community to choose their trust system above others, I believe there is almost no way around collaborating with Facebook or another large social network such as Google+ to be successful. The portable identity system that Facebook has (knowingly or not) created is a good foundation for building an online trust system. A trust start-up could turn this rudimentary system into one that meets the needs of P2P platforms — especially those with high personal risks (like giving somebody your car, or letting them into your home) — by offering additional services such as verifying identities in person, aggregating data, and creating other trust metrics.