On Tue, 16 Mar 2004, Yakov Shafranovich wrote:
So the bottom line is that we lack trust.
Nothing truer has ever been said. This is a feature of human society:
People are not trustworthy.
Lacking any way to positively, uniquely, and inalterably identify people
from birth to death, we cannot implement a trust system. People (abusers)
would just change their (electronic) identities or steal someone elses.
What would people do who had their identities stolen? How could you
_trust_ the claim of electronic identity theft?
Credit card companies substantiate such claims when the purchases could
not have been made by the person whose credit card was stolen. Yet it is
still a major problem, and it is crime, and a lot of money is involved. My
GF signed up for a Red Sox Credit card at a booth outside fenway a couple
years ago. Then she got a call for activity on a credit card that she
never got. Fortunately, the purchases were in stores in London, and she
hadn't been to London. The credit card was deactivated and the charges
removed.
How do you plan to solve a "trust" problem that costs no money, and must
be essentially free to the user? If you have a solution, don't bother with
spam. Call Visa, and be rich. On second thought, call me. I'll split it
with you :-)
This echoes the comments made
by the IAB in section 3.1 of
(http://www.iab.org/documents/drafts/draft-iab-e2e-futures-05.txt).
How would introducing trust help with the spam problem? Would the cost
of doing so perhaps would be so prohibitive that we will not be able to
do so? Is it really possible to introduce trust that will actually work?
Yakov