Did you get a chance to read the draft version of the NSTIC , published by the White House, June 25? We sure did, and we’re hoping to be part of the community moving the national strategy forward. Here’s a quote from the introductory paragraph:

“Imagine a world where individuals can seamlessly access information and services online from a variety of sources – the government, the private sector, other individuals, and even across national borders – with reduced fear of identity theft or fraud, lower probability of losing access to critical services and data, and without the need to manage many accounts and passwords. Individuals can conduct a wide variety of transactions online and trust the identities of the entities with which they interact. Individuals know what information service providers are collecting about them and how they are using it. They have choice in the number and types of user-friendly identity credentials they manage and use to assert their identity online.”

Trufina has not only been imagining that world, we’ve been building it….read our initial comments, Enhanced Online Security, Reduced Fraud and Personal Privacy. Today! Take a few additional moments to register on the forum and vote “I agree” at the top of our post. With your support our views will get more attention.

If you have an opinion on the strategy, post your comments there as well. Let us know and we’ll link to them in this blog. It’s a good opportunity to tell the government, and the entire internet community what you think.

Since Trufina is in the “trust” business, I thought it would be appropriate to attend a recent talk “How to Win Sales and Influence People: The Art of Trust Based Selling” led by Charles H. Green, founder and CEO of Trusted Advisor Associates and author of Trust-based Selling. Charlie was joined by Mark Roberge, VP Sales at HubSpot. The event was hosted by the Harvard Business School Association of Boston.

I was most curious about how their principles of trust based selling aligned with our view of Trufina’s role in helping build trust on the Internet. We are very careful to create a safe haven for member’s precious identity information at Trufina, and we work very hard to give you the tools to communicate that information in the most secure way possible. It is extremely important that we build our brand to reflect those basic tenets of our business.

Interestingly, I realized that the principles Charlie shared, and that Mark Roberge’s sales team practice at HubSpot, are equally important to our members as they use their verified identity information to build trust online. While this specific talk was about truth in selling, the larger theory has to do with trust in influencing people.

Two of Charlie’s principles of trust-based selling are:

– The power of reciprocity on influence, and where it appears in business, and

– Why trust-based selling doesn’t draw down on trust—it creates it in the sales process itself.

Trufina’s services are designed so that people interacting on the Internet can exchange verified identity information to build trust, which becomes the basis of influence. And trust, once initiated, establishes the foundation for stronger relationships moving forward.

Many of Trufina’s web partners serve as excellent examples of how sharing verified identity information becomes the foundation for exerting influence on others. MavenResearch might be the best example. By verifying their identity and other personal credentials, Maven’s members enhance their likelihood of being selected for paid phone consultations.

We also see many of Trufina’s members using their Trufina Seal as a way to build trust, and ultimately influence on their blogs and other commenting forums. We invite you to share your personal stories on how building trust has enhanced your online experience.

The Trusted Advisor.com whitepaper, “Think More Expertise Will Make You More Trusted? Think Again” answers other trust-related questions that you should find useful in building online relationships. You can get a copy at the Trusted Advisor website.

On September 23rd and 24th Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center hosted an Internet Safety Technical Task Force (ISTTF) open meeting, where 15 companies made presentations on technological solutions intended to help make the Internet safer for America’s youth. The Internet Safety Technical Task Force, you recall, was created in February 2008 by the Attorneys General Multi-State Working Group on Social Networking and MySpace.

Anyone following the public meetings should be interested in icouldbe.org’s recently published news story about their participation. Frankly, icouldbe.org’s presentation was the only one by a company fully committed to providing an absolutely safe environment for youth on the Internet. In fact, their existence depends on it. We’re grateful to have them as a partner on the development of Trufina’s Child Protection Suite.

The most informative presentation at the meeting might have been the one given by a few of the youth representing Teenangels.org, which is part of WiredSafety.org Teenangels is a group of 13-18 year-old volunteers that have been specially trained by the local law enforcement, and many other leading safety experts in all aspects of online safety, privacy, and security. The teenangels research indicated that children and youth feel that their biggest online threat was from cyberbullying, and that the most effective means for limiting cyberbullying would be to provide tools to identify offenders, to kick the
‘bad actors” off the hosting community sites, and to ban them thereafter. So if the technology companies were listening, the keys are:

- Apparent anonymity needs to be accompanied by tools to hold offenders responsible. The teenangels specified tools for identity verification, not just age specific verification, so that offenders can be identified.
-The identity tools need to allow the hosting website to remove the offenders quickly, and to ban them permanently. So the tools must prove uniqueness.

As in daily life, cyberbullying is perpetrated by a minority of the community. Once children and youth realize that they will be banned permanently from participation, their behavior will improve, or they will not be allowed to play in the digital playground created by the hosting community sites.

Not coincidentally, the tools for limiting cyberbullying are similar to the ones that should be used for keeping predatory adults from interacting with children. And guess what, the combination of anonymity through the use of pseudonyms, coupled with identity verification by a hosting web site, would provide the same benefit of cleaning up adult behavior on forums and blogs Internet wide. Is it possible that improved behavior by adults might influence the behavior of our youth?

Due to overwhelming demand from our members, Trufina has updated their Verified Identity Cards to make it easier for people viewing an Identity Card to ask the owner to see more identity details. The viewer makes a request by filling out the form associated with the Identity Card. Examples of the Trufina Identity Card are:
https://profile.trufina.com/trubarb
or
https://profile.trufina.com/madsen
-
When a request is submitted, the owner of the Trufina Verified ID card receives an email detailing the request. The owner can then choose to do one of the following:
1) Share more details of their identity with the requester.
2) Get more information from the requester before sharing details.
3) Ignore the request.

Trufina puts you in control of your identity, and provides you with the tools to share as little or as much as you want to. Protecting your online identity, as well as giving you the opportunity to build and establish trust in your online relationships.

Try it out. Click on the link above and ask me or Chris to share some details of our identities. We’ll send you an email with a link to the Trufina home page where you can view our IDs. (Note: security standards are in place for limiting the views on the shared id card).

A good summary of online identity management can be found at:
http://www.openparenthesis.org/2008/09/26/online-identity-management

Love to hear from you about our new service.

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There’s lots of good stuff in the New Scientist article Don’t let cyber-spite ruin your good name, and a bunch of great companies mentioned – ClaimID, TrustPlus, and ReputationDefender . The issue is not just reputation, and the protection of your reputation (which is certainly the end result), but is the person posting a comment, negative or positive, really real or completely anonymous?

Just like in the real world, someone is more likely to shout some craziness from the bleachers, versus in an in person forum, where they have to introduce themselves in some fashion but they do have to prove they are identifiable.

Don’t let cyberspite destroy your good name

You buy a television on eBay. When it arrives, you eagerly unwrap it, only to find it is badly scratched. You return it, and leave a negative comment about the seller on the site. The next day, you find the seller has retaliated by posting a nasty comment about you, branding you as a time-waster. Suddenly, no one wants to sell to you and your reputation is in tatters.

Until now eBay’s rating system, which allows users of the auction and trading site to leave good or bad comments about their trading partners, has worked well. Sellers who ship out damaged goods, or items that do not match their online description, rightly get a black mark against their name. However, this system has recently come under increasing pressure from an all-too-human failing: spite. Sellers can easily retaliate against buyers who have named and shamed them, leaving unwarranted but highly visible comments – perhaps claiming that the buyers do not follow through with purchases, or needlessly return items they have bought.

Fear of this retaliatory renegging can deter buyers from posting negative comments about their trading experiences. In turn, this threatens to undermine the trust that buyers place in sellers ratings.

So severe has the renegging problem become that this month eBay was forced to change its rating system, preventing sellers from posting negative comments about bad buyers on the site.

In an online auction site like eBay, your reputation is your livelihood. Economists Daniel Houser of George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, and John Wooders of the University of Arizona, Tucson, have shown that sellers with positive ratings are able to sell items at higher prices, because buyers will willingly shell out greater sums just to be sure they are buying from a trustworthy source. And more people are likely to bid on items offered by those of good standing (Journal of Economics and Management Strategy, vol 15, p 353).

In a study to be published in the Journal of Consumer Research next month, Amar Cheema of Washington University in St Louis also found that when a seller’s reputation is less than squeaky clean, bidders are more likely to scrutinize additional costs such as shipping charges and bail out if they are too high. When the seller’s reputation is good, however, buyers are less interested in such surcharges, and sellers are more likely to secure a deal.

Trading websites are not the only place where nasty comments can have serious financial implications. When someone writes something malicious about you online it can be read by anyone typing your name into a search engine for years to come – including potential employers and university admissions staff. And as the number of websites that people use to buy and sell or make new friends and business contacts increases, so too does the need to guard against such acts of cyber-spite.

We’re excited to announce that we rolled out a new feature which allows a Trufina user to share an ID Card with anyone they want. Previously an ID Card could be shared only if both the sender and the recipient were Trufina members. Now, a Trufina member to share an ID Card with anyone who has a valid email address. Total control of the ID Cards is still entirely in the hands of the Trufina user – you control each piece of your identity -

name, age, street, city, state, email/IM addresses, background check, as well as all the others    

Each item can be individually included, or not, as well as showing the details or just that it has been verified (i.e. your actual age, or just that your age has been verified). You can also revoke access to your ID Card at any time.Please let us know if you have any comments or suggestions.-Chris 

Several weeks ago we rolled into production a new set of API’s which allow partners to integrate Trufina services into their websites, and makes it easier for our users to share their information with websites. We’ve updated our website with some basic information about the API’s, and we’ll be adding more information to the API section of our site over time.

We have also rolled out our API’s with the folks at Naymz. Now Naymz users can access and utilize the Trufina services in a seamless manner – seamless being the keyword. If you are an existing Trufina user, you just have to log into your account and grant the information to Naymz. If you are not, you can go through our verification process. In either case, you can then pull back verified identity information into your Naymz accounts via the Trufina API, and post a verified shield to your Naymz profile. Additionally, users will receive 50 RepScore points if they go through the verification process.

We’re honored and proud to be working with Naymz, and are excited to be part of their offering, as well as providing a great additional service to our members.

Just a quick post to let you know that we revised our website, with a new look, and more information about the product, and how it can be used to improve your use of the internet. We’ve also spent a lot of time improving our back end support/email tracking systems. We hope that if you have any questions, comments, or feedback, you will write into us.