I came across an interesting article today on ResellerNews: Why you can’t trust ‘friends’ on social networks. The headline is a little misleading as the article is actually about a form of identity theft – a method for setting up a scam based upon fraudulently ‘friending’ one’s way into someone’s network and then leveraging that relationship to commit some kind of fraud.

Have a read it’s interesting and what is does highlight to me again is just how important some form of trust engine is to the internet as a whole. This I have not fully thought through by a long way but to my thinking we need tools and information exposure online that better enables us to replicate the conscious & subconscious checks we make on others before establishing and maintaining an offline relationship.

Before I have mentioned that trust is a personal viewpoint on another and their ability/likelihood to undertake a certain action. That trust is really just an aggregate view on a number of factors that matter at that point within context to the trustor.

The problem I see right now on social networks is that the marking up of the relationship is i) too simplistic, ii) not transparent enough & iii) not supported by any form of reputation metric.

For example; in the article had the potential victims of the scam had access to more information than the standard “Joe Bloggs want to add you to their network / be your friend…” then in most likely there would be fewer victims and therefore less incentive to scam.

What information do I mean? Well simple stuff like when the sender’s account was created, reputation metrics like number of posts or interactions, maybe one day even the ability to explode the sender’s profile out to view their identity across a number of social networks.

When did you last give a guy you met in the pub once $500 to bail them out of a Nigerian jail?

I think it’s more a case of “Why you shouldn’t automatically trust ‘friends’ on social networks”