The risks of a poorly understood reputation based economy - Part I - People

Jan 08 2007

By Kurt Seifried (kurt@seifried.org)

Everyone has a reputation, originally that reputation was only known to personal associates and work associates. As time went on, companies created institutional memory (a.k.a. filing cabinets), and companies that dealt with you directly would typically keep some form of record about your reputation (e.g. “pays bills on time”). As time has gone on, more and more entities have started keeping information on other entities that they deal with, and numerous companies have sprung up that deal exclusively in assessing, measuring, analyzing and reporting the reputation of people (such as credit rating agencies, police records, etc.). This has lead to a complex set of social interactions, including entire economies based on reputation, which is poorly understood at best, and simply ignored at worst.

When I meet someone professionally I ask for their email address. Not so that I can email them, but rather so that I can plug their particular details into Google and see what comes out. Do they post to mailing lists, or are they “invisible” online? If they post, what topics are they commonly associated with? How is their grammar and spelling? Are they prone to flaming people online? Based on this and other factors, I then decide whether or not to interact with them on an ongoing basis. Sometimes I find something particularly embarrassingly about someone, such as a posting indicating that the person lacks technical knowledge they claim to have, or is known to lie. Sometimes I find a hidden gem – someone who has not made a lot of noise publicly, but regularly posts brilliant articles on a personal web log, for example.

Do I formally make these assessments, working through some mathematical formula? Did I ever take a class in school that specifically covered this type of social knowledge? Nope. But, like all people, I do it.

Am I aware of the risks inherent in such a system? Somewhat. Quite honestly, up until a year ago I was largely oblivious to even my own behavior in this arena, even as I googled them to see what they had done. Was I consciously aware that I was creating a rating that would strongly influence my interactions with this person? Nope. I’m willing to bet most people aren’t aware as well. This led to me consciously re-evaluating certain people and trying to figure out why I had assigned them particularly “low” or “high” scores. In the process I became aware of some potential problems with the way and criterion I was using to judge people.

But like they say in most 12 step programs, step 1 is admitting you have a problem (actually I’m not sure of this, but it sounds good).

The first and most blindingly obvious (to me at least) risk in this was that a person’s public persona (specifically “a person’s perceived or evident personality, as that of a well-known official, actor, or celebrity; personal image; public role.”) was constructed of publicly available information (the word “public” is important here). People who tend to post on mailing lists, write on web logs, write open source software and so on will of course have more results in a Google search than someone who doesn’t. A Google search for “kurt seifried” results in about 162,000 hits, I have a relatively unique name (there is a “William Kurt Seifried” who goes by “Kurt Seifried” but largely has no presence online), however a search for my wife’s name returns 42 results, of which 2 are actually about her (yes, I googled her after we were introduced). So risk number one would be forming opinions on incomplete or simply nonexistent data.

To say nothing of the bias in the data. People rarely post embarrassing or detrimental information about themselves (like … I can’t touch type. Seriously, I never learned, I still look sometimes, guess I won’t be getting any secretarial jobs anytime soon). However, most people, especially those with opinions that they like to share with the world (I of course would know nothing about this =) often have people who like what they say, and as often as not also have people who dislike what they say. A classic example from Slashdot:

Here here! I’ve never seen Kurt Seifried say anything new or interesting. He just re-hashes what has been known for years in the most sensationalist way that he can. From what I can tell its just to get more visitors to the SecurityPortal site (to sell more banner ads) and to gratify his ego. It would be different if he at least knew what he was talking about but the vague (yet ominous) way he explains concepts clearly exposes his lack of insight.

So chances are any opinions formed from online information would tend to be overly optimistic since it’s unlikely that you will see the negative side to a person’s online reputation, unless you look.

Additionally the type of person that does stellar work but doesn’t post much information online (perhaps because they are so busy doing stellar work) is unlikely to create much of a footprint online, and thus it would be hard to form a favorable opinion (or any opinion for that matter) of them. Maybe they’re to busy saving the world to post about how great they are.

The wisdom of crowds, manipulation, propaganda, PR, D&B and other oddities – more to come later.

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