Ask HN: How do you establish trust with strangers?
To establish trust I asked them to Facetime and share IDs mutually, but they balked. I've tried this before and people are generally reluctant. Asking for a mutual phone call with a trusted person was also met with suspicion.
Ultimately, I met the escrow agents and sellers face-to-face at their business to collect business cards and transfer information. There's still no better authentication than meeting a person at their place of business: they have business cards, an office, co-workers – half a dozen signals to verify identity.
Despite the high incidence of wire fraud and identity theft, authentication protocols are all one-sided. Customers require credentials but there's no way to authenticate the business agents. This goes beyond banking to include healthcare, utilities, credit bureaus, the tax industry – any business relationship that shares sensitive or personal info.
tl;dr :
So, how do you go about establishing trust with strangers in order to share sensitive information or transfer money? What process and / or tech do you use to identify & trust the other side of the transaction?
My Proposal :
On the social side, we need to improve the culture of verifying identity to encourage a mutual process. Both sides need to share IDs and proofs of identity for any transaction to be sound.
As for technology, we need better systems to empower customers to validate the authenticity of agents, including one-time tokens and business verification. A system like "The Work Number", used for employee verification, could be effective to validate business agents without compromising them. These systems need to be stable over legacy channels like phone, fax, wire transfers, paper checks & email – systems that will remain for 30+ years.
As software engineers we need to establish trust mutually and give more attention to the business-side of the trust relationship.