The Backbone of Future Society: eReputation

Reputation appears to be one of the fundamental needs in human societies, serving as a vital pillar that supports successful collaboration. Whom to vote for in an election, which company to work for, which doctor to choose for your health concerns, or which bank to trust with your money – all of these decisions hinge on reputation. But how can you assess the reputation of a professional, company, or service if you’ve never encountered them before?

In recent years, platforms have emerged as major players in this market. A rating on booking.com can tell you how good a hotel is, Glassdoor offers insights into companies, and GoogleMaps – local businesses. Meanwhile, China’s social credit system can either fast-track your career or land you in prison. Therefore a crucial question arises: isn't too much power being concentrated in the hands of those managing these ratings? Most importantly, is there a better way?

We’re all familiar with the concept of likes and reviews, which have become an integral part of any platform. When choosing a seaside hotel, we naturally check what other tourists have to say about it.

The Web 3.0 Data Space concept advocates for separating data from platforms and returning ownership to users, companies, and things that truly own it. The main motivation behind this shift is to eliminate vendor lock-in and data silos. By concentrating data in personal eVaults, data owners can store their information in one place (avoiding silos), while platforms can access it equally, allowing users to switch between platforms as easily as changing browsers (preventing vendor lock-in).

But if we're returning all data to its rightful owners, why should likes and comments remain with platforms, e.g. in the case of booking platforms we considered above?

All customer feedback for each hotel should be also consolidated in the hotel's eVault, regardless of which platform or service collected those likes.

To simplify the evaluation process for guests, hotels may want to showcase their overall eReputation, calculated from those thousands likes and comments. In the Web 3.0 Data Space, many rating services will gladly compute such an eReputation for hotels. The key point is that, from this moment on, all the data required to calculate eReputation will reside with the hotel, in its own eVault.

But wouldn’t the hotel be able to simply delete negative reviews from its eVault? Let’s clarify right away: the hotel won’t be able to (even if it wanted to) alter or remove the original likes and reviews to boost its reputation. All reviews will be signed (and chained together, but without using blockchain) by users with their eID, ensuring authenticity and completely excluding the participation of anonymous bots. For more on the W3DS security system, see the article here.

Pretty much everything: individuals, organizations, machines, services, documents...

For example, it could fundamentally change the world of scientific publications by solving a major issue of article and researcher rankings, which has significantly slowed down modern science.

Or imagine hiring a construction crew and being able to see real reviews from all their previous clients. Not just about the company, but also the lifetime eReputation of each individual worker. This is particularly important, as today, dishonest contractors often shut down one company and open another, effectively wiping their negative history clean.

Now, picture filing a complaint against Facebook. As it stands, the complaint is only visible to Facebook. But in the Web 3.0 Data Space, it would be publicly accessible through Facebook's eVault, affecting its reputation permanently.

But isn't this just like a social credit system? That’s illegal!

Actually, no. What’s illegal is when your social rating is calculated by agencies hired by your bank without informing you.

With eReputation in W3DS, the calculation is requested by a hotel itself to attract customers. Or you may choose to have your own eReputation calculated before applying for a job you like.

In both cases, the owner of the data requests the reputation assessment and decides whether to show it or not. This is 100% legal.

At this point, we’re often asked: Are you trying to create a system like in China, where a bad reputation can land you in jail?

No, we don’t want anything like that. Let’s break it down.

First, we didn’t invent likes and reviews. They’ve been around on platforms for over a decade, and you use them in your daily life, so we can’t (and likely don’t want to) stop this game.

What we can do is give you a choice between three options on who calculates and holds your reputation from the likes you get anyway:

1. Your reputation is tracked by the government (as in China),
2. Your reputation is tracked by platforms owners (as in America),
3. Or you track your own eReputation yourself (as in W3DS).

You choose. It seems there isn’t a fourth option.

Moreover, you're mistaken if you think doing nothing will make things better. Right now, we're already heading down path #2 (or #1 if you are in China or Russia). Corporations are collecting your likes, while little-known rating agencies buy up this data (is that even legal?) and sell KYC ratings to banks. Taking control of your own data and reputation is the only alternative to state or corporate monopolies.

And this alternative opens up enormous opportunities for you! For example, it will be much easier to find a job, secure a cheaper loan, or attract new partners. Additionally, if you move to a new city or country, you won’t have to rebuild your reputation from scratch. Your reputation will move with you.

As eReputation grows in popularity, it may become a key aspect of our lives, making the difference between failure and success. Naturally, this raises the question: will people try to manipulate it? For instance, imagine an organized mass attack against John Smith, which severely lowers his reputation.

Yes, it's possible.

But it's important to understand what happens next.

If the Rating Platform A fails to detect the bullying, the Rating Platform B may use advanced AI to detect the pattern of the coordinated attack in the context of other similar cases. John Smith will switch to Platform B and give Platform A a dislike. Platform A’s reputation will drop, and it will quickly lose its place in the market.

Next, Rating Platform B will identify all participants in the bullying attack, and mark their eReputation with black marks, tarnishing their lives for a long time.

Now, let’s imagine the attack was well-executed, and no platform detected it. John Smith could indeed suffer. However, in two or three years, another AI-powered rating systems may reach a level where, upon John Smith’s request, they reanalyze his log files. And – voilà – they uncover the orchestrated attack. All the perpetrators will be punished (as their signatures will stay in the logs) and likely required to compensate John.

What can we conclude from this? Anyone considering manipulating eReputation may reconsider, as the inevitability of consequences renders such attacks pointless.

I’m sure everyone has experienced moments when, after choosing a restaurant with high ratings on Google Maps or TripAdvisor, they left feeling disappointed.

It’s not surprising – after all, we’re all different. For example, Anna loves chocolate cakes, while Bob prefers vanilla milkshakes. For Anna, the local bakery’s reputation would likely be higher than McDonald’s, but for Bob, it’s the opposite.

Another example: Bob loves spare ribs, but in the eyes of an Iranian citizen, his reputation might be quite low because of that.

It makes sense to expect that different people, in different situations and contexts, should see different reputations for the same individuals, organizations, or services. Competition among rating platforms will support this further.

eReputation should always be in the eye of the beholder! This is quite unusual, as we’ve become accustomed to seeing universal ratings through the lens of Google or Booking.com, which base their ratings on their own (and usually hidden), not necessarily our, criteria. This more personalized, complex approach could be implemented in the Web 3.0 Data Space.

Let’s take a look at the positive changes this kind of eReputation could bring:

• Instead of having your ratings distributed between platforms the eReputation is the single source of truth, in your hands
• You won't need to make an effort to "sell" yourself: your partners and employers will know (if you allow) how well you fit their needs.
• When you move to a new city or country, you won’t have to build your reputation from scratch – it stays with you.
• This shift enables you to transition from being a consumer to a "prosumer" because freelancing will become much easier for you.
• It will likely reduce advertising costs for businesses significantly. Why advertise when people will make choices mostly on reliable and relevant to them eReputation? Those funds can be better spent improving the quality of your service, which will be evaluated and appreciated.
• We can also expect a major decrease in fake news, as it will be easy to identify false information based on the reputation of its creators.
• Most importantly, this system will limit the ability of AI systems to manipulate people. The moment a certain percentage of individuals or other AI systems detect hidden agendas, the reputation of that AI will take a nosedive.
• As we outlined in our article on the W3DS security system, eReputation will become one of the key mechanisms for crowdsourced system security.

eReputation is a complex but essential improvement in the current ecosystem of anonymous likes and obscure reputation calculation – and more importantly, it transfers the ownership to data owners. We invite you to explore this with us.

The rise of platforms brought crowdsourced reputation to life, making things easier by saving us from learning every lesson the hard way. But along the way, they started selling our reputation to anyone who’d buy it. With W3DS, we can make reputation even more powerful and transparent – while keeping it firmly in your own hands.