PeerTrust

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City: Court-saint-étienne

State: Brabant Wallon

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Country: Belgium

PeerTrust is building a digital identity document that helps participants in the sharing economy trust one another by knowing who they are dealing with beforehands based on a peer-validated web of trust. Trust between strangers is a key issue in the sharing economy, all the more so as it is trying to become mainstream. The problem is that for years, we have been using identity paradigms based on avatars, online profiles and nicknames, and those were fine so long as we were only interacting online. But with the sharing economy, we start interacting online and we end up meeting offline, with potentially physical consequences to our behaviour towards one another. Facebook profiles, nicknames and paper document copies are simply not adapted to identifying us in these situations. On the other hand, when it comes to trust between strangers, a lot of people are focusing solely on reputation. But reputation is easy to steal and manipulate if it is not based on a strong identity foundation. Plus, in the physical world, the first question you ask someone in order to know whether you can trust them is not "what have you done in the past?" or "how do you usually behave?". It starts with "who are you?", because your past behaviour can never guarantee 100% that you&s;ll behave nicely in the future, but if I know who you are, and I know how to get back to you, how to make you accountable for your actions, then I have an insurance policy in case something bad does happen. And since you are accountable, you are less likely to mess with me. So reputation is important, but only second to identity. PeerTrust is creating a digital identity document, the passport, in the form of a mobile application that stores your identity information completely private (never sent to our servers, only sent to others with your agreement and encrypted) and allows you to get your identity checked and stamped by as many PeerTrust passport bearers as possible. It uses proven security technologies like RSA and PGP to protect your identity information and guarantee the solidity of the web of trust. Once you have your PeerTrust passport stamped, you can connect it with your accounts in sharing economy services and use it to identity yourself and others.

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