Welcome to Trusty!
Introducing my weekly exploration of how technology is changing the ways we build trust online
Our trust in institutions is at an all-time low.
At the same time, we're placing more and more faith in online platforms. We’re increasingly relying on technology to teach us about the world, keep our most intimate conversations private, monitor our health, find us jobs, manage our finances, deliver things to us and deliver us to where we want to go.
The past few years have shown us the pitfalls of being too quick to trust these digital tools — massive data breaches, creepy privacy violations, election hackings, violent crimes committed by gig economy users. But, they’ve also revealed glimpses of a future where those same tools might enable us to connect, share, work and interact with each other in ways we never thought possible.
So, what is Trusty?
Trusty is an email newsletter exploring how technology is changing the way we establish trust, how we lose it, and who is (and should be) making the rules.
My name is Tyler (more about me here), and each week I’ll be taking a look at a different tech company, technology, government body or regulation, talking with employees, experts, policymakers, consumers and users about its approach to building trust and how that’s working. I’ll also break down some of the week's top news stories and how they intersect with the thorny problem of ensuring trust in the digital age.
My aim with this newsletter is to share engaging, accessible and nuanced content and, hopefully, we can all learn something new along the way. That said, many of you may already know a lot about these technologies and companies, so please do write back with any thoughts, suggestions or questions that come up as you read Trusty.
For this welcome issue, I'll briefly walk through how I got interested in this topic and why I think it’s important enough to need its own newsletter. Or, if you’re already excited (or frightened) about learning more, subscribe below!
How did we get here?
Though this trend extends far beyond the U.S., Gallup’s “Confidence in Institutions” survey does a great job highlighting how Americans’ trust in various institutions has eroded over the past few decades. The only exceptions are the military, law enforcement, small business and the medical system (not shown below), something I hope to explore in future issues.
Percent of Americans with “great deal” or “quite a lot” of trust in…
It probably isn’t surprising to see that the press hasn’t fared so well on this front. Everything from media bias — which goes beyond political slant — to journalism’s lack of diversity has given the public plenty of reasons to be skeptical of its reporting. That’s in some ways a good thing! People should think critically about any information they get, especially online.
However, it does make my job a bit more challenging. Yes, I have to acknowledge the irony in asking you to trust a journalist to bring you accurate information about trust, a topic my own industry has struggled with so deeply. But my incentive to establish and keep the trust of both my readers and sources is just as strong as any online platform.
It’s all about incentives
While Gallup’s survey makes it clear that people have become more distrustful of institutions, guess who’s doing really well? Tech companies (except Facebook, they still have some work to do). According to a 2018 poll from Georgetown University's Baker Center for Leadership & Governance, Amazon and Google were the second and third most trusted of the institutions they asked people about.
If you think about these tech platforms’ businesses, each needs its users to believe that the platform is providing trustworthy products, services, recommendations or information. When Amazon first began selling books online in 1995, it might have been able to reach a handful of early internet users who saw the promise of e-commerce. But in order to grow to an (almost) trillion-dollar company, it had to convince shoppers that both the products and the sellers were legitimate.
The same goes for Google, which had to persuade people that its search engine could provide more reliable (or at least more useful) answers to their questions than alternatives like the local library. Both Google and Amazon had incredibly strong incentives to gain their users’ trust. Arguably, those are less strong now that we’re so dependent on their products, but at least they were there initially.
Virtually every online marketplace or platform has an incentive to build trust. How much trust each needs depends on what they’re asking of users — PayPal needs more to move and store your money than Yelp does to convince you to search for a restaurant. But any company wanting to position itself as a digital middleman has to prove that it can actually connect each side in a way that doesn’t screw one party over.
Lyft and Uber don’t work if riders feel less safe than they do getting in a taxi. Apple closes access to the App Store so iPhone users can rest easy that their apps won’t come embedded with malware. Wikipedia seeks to guarantee article quality by requiring its editors to adhere to specific editing policies and include official sources in the footnotes.
Our modern digital economy doesn't function without trust, which is why online companies have such a strong incentive to establish it.
Before the internet, we had to rely more on institutions to facilitate interactions with people we didn't know. Now, we're leveraging new technologies, such as blockchain, to disintermediate trust. That shift could completely upend the way we build businesses, governments and even societies — a shift that comes with both immense potential and extreme risk, and one that is definitely worth exploring.
Let’s get started!
Tyler
Got friends who you think would enjoy this? Share Trusty with them!