Since one of the most important long-term goals of the Locker Project is enabling a more powerful sharing platform between people (interconnecting Lockers via TeleHash), I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the fundamentals of sharing and communicating online, and it always seems to come back to one intangible concept: Trust.  I’ve been breaking this into more traditional components to understand them better and wanted to share these ideas about the tenets of *digital* trust, which has real-life trust analogies but also more complexities being online.  I like to apply each one of these to any ditigal system to help guide my understanding of how it creates trust:

• Authenticity
• Verifiability
• Security
• Transparency
• Consistency

Authenticity is essentially the digital identifiers that are associated with someone and the confidence in whatever system generates those identifiers, that they represent the same person when repeated.

Verifiability is the degree of your ability to establish the authenticity of someone, either actually in person or via another trusted person or system.  It typically precipitates and helps build authenticity, and comes into question when something unexpected or important happens.

Security is the confidence in the integrity of the computing system both that you’re using, and that the other person is using.  There’s less trust when using public terminals or if suspicious dialogs happen on your own system, and equally so you wouldn’t share something important to a friend who’s using a possibly compromised system.

Transparency is all about user interface and messaging, it’s how clear and consistent the tools and dialogs are in communicating what is happening.  It’s about creating complete expectations and delivering within those without trying to hide anything.

Consistency is the complete experience over time and the most obvious one. Fundamentally, does the interface and do the identifiers create a predictable pattern that build confidence in someones digital experience.

Since this is just a snapshot of my current thinking it’s likely to evolve and change as I try to apply it to more and more online experiences (like, is Security really worth highlighting on it’s own, or is it just a consequence of the others?).  For now it’s been a very handy way to tease apart some of the complexities of digital trust as we build the learnings into the foundation of the Locker Project, aiming to do a great job at connecting people with their data and better empowering them to share safely with others.