Trustiser

• One of the major and persistent threats to human well-being in the digital world is related to trust and reputation management; that is because while an ever-growing chunk of our daily life takes place in the digital world, this world has glaring weaknesses when it comes to trust and reputation management which makes it prone to fake news, fake reviews, digital identity theft, digital privacy breach, digital scamming, etc.
• One of the most serious weaknesses of online trust and reputation management is the fact that trust and reputation management is very often a minor afterthought feature; moreover, the management is highly fragmented and scattered within a myriad of independent online services; instead, a comprehensive and unified approach built from the ground up is needed.
• Human societies are organized hierarchically, and the basis of the hierarchy is trust, therefore trust and reputation management in the digital world should also be organized hierarchically; the hierarchy should be based on sincerity and experience/expertise, on a topic basis.
• For the human brain, opinions, evaluations, and recommendations are much more useful than mere information because they have a big impact on trust inference. Trust inference encourages risk-taking and decision-making. Therefore, as far as online trust and reputation management is concerned, schemes based on opinions, evaluations, recommendations, and ratings should be used whenever this is possible.
• There is a need to combine artificial intelligence with human intelligence in order to manage efficiently online trust and reputation by ensuring total transparency and traceability as to the estimate of trust and reputation and thus providing a trust assessment that is trustworthy; such would not be the case with a pure artificial intelligence approach.
• The fundamental and unsolvable problem of existing social networks is that originally they were designed as networks, in other words with a focus on connecting people; their designers were oblivious to the fact that by connecting people, they create “virtual human societies”, opening the door to many “social” issues, including trust and reputation issues.
• There is an urgent need to develop a new, more mature generation of social networks, centered on positive emotions: trust, empathy, kindness, gratitude, etc. as a response to the flaws of existing social networks; in particular the fact that they thrive to a significant extent on negative emotions: jealousy, anger, hatred, contempt, distrust, etc.

Rafik Hanibeche & Adel Amri (Trustiser Founders)