Trust and the Internet
My business partner and I are going to be in Seattle as part of the Microsoft Accelerator for Windows Azure powered by Tech Stars program – for three months. Being an unfunded start-up means we need to find a reasonably-priced, short-term, furnished apartment because three months in a hotel is not in our budget. So, of course we turned to the Internet for help. Eventually, we found a good place on a “vacation rental by owner” website, and contacted the owner via email. We worked out an amenable price, and as we were figuring out the next step, he mentioned he was in Austin for SXSW, and that we should meet. Great! I’ll call him Bob.
Not really Bob.
Bob was really nice and seemed totally normal. We had a nice discussion about work, family, all that polite stuff. We talked about the apartment, about Seattle, about the terms of the agreement and all seemed totally normal.
And then we gave him a check for several thousand dollars.
So here is what we really know about Bob:
1. He can enter text and pictures into a Website
2. He is charismatic in person
I’m an engineer who often works in the security arena, so I can’t help but think of paranoid, worst-case scenarios.
Here is where I imagine our money ended up.
I started thinking about all of the things that we were inferring about Bob:
1. He actually lives in Seattle
2. He actually works for the respectable place he said he worked for
3. He owns the apartment he rented out to us
4. He doesn’t have secret cameras installed all over the house to record our private activities for www.buttscratching.com
We used our human intuition to infer these things, and many others. That works really well a lot of the time. However, people who want to rip you off know how human intuition works, and they know how to take advantage of that. I was thinking of how I would explain this to my father, if it turns out Bob ripped us off:
“See, Dad, there is this thing called the Internet. A bunch of people communicate with each other via their computers. No, they don’t know each other. Anyhow, we met a guy on the Internet who had an apartment for rent and then we gave him some money. No, we didn’t know him. No, we didn’t know anyone who knew him. But he had an ad on a website. A website is kind of like an electronic flyer…”
Now, if Bob had come recommended by an actual trusted friend, I wouldn’t have any concerns at all. Trust weakens somewhat via transition: If trust Adam 100% and he trusts Bob 100%, I might trust Bob 80%. But it is still a pretty high level of trust.
I’m not actually worried about getting ripped off by Bob. But my reason for not worrying seems to be more laziness than actual trust. It would be nice if we had some way of really identifying who we were dealing with in this Internet world.