New criteria for online trust verification

You’re shopping online for a skincare product, scrolling through a series of glowing reviews: “Incredible results,” “Best product ever,” “Changed my skin completely.” It’s compelling. But behind the scenes, many of these endorsements aren’t coming from genuine customers—they’re often written by employees, automated bots, or paid reviewers. This type of review manipulation has undermined consumer confidence and made it difficult for honest businesses to compete. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in the United States has decided to crack down on these deceptive practices. The FTC has introduced a new rule directly targeting fake reviews and misleading testimonials, with the aim of restoring trust in the online marketplace. Here’s what the new measures include: 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐅𝐓𝐂’𝐬 𝐍𝐞𝐰 𝐌𝐞𝐚𝐬𝐮𝐫𝐞𝐬: 📌Reviews generated by bots, employees, or paid actors are now explicitly banned. 📌Repurposing positive feedback from one product for another is no longer allowed. 📌Practices like “review gating,” where feedback is only solicited from satisfied customers, are prohibited. 📌Companies must disclose any incentives provided in exchange for reviews. 𝐈𝐦𝐩𝐚𝐜𝐭 𝐨𝐧 𝐁𝐮𝐬𝐢𝐧𝐞𝐬𝐬𝐞𝐬: Fake reviews have skewed the online marketplace for years, misleading consumers and giving unethical brands an unfair advantage. With penalties up to $50,000 per violation, the FTC’s rule is designed to hold companies accountable and level the playing field. 𝐖𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐁𝐮𝐬𝐢𝐧𝐞𝐬𝐬𝐞𝐬 𝐍𝐞𝐞𝐝 𝐭𝐨 𝐃𝐨: If your marketing relies on customer reviews, now is the time for a thorough review audit. Verify that testimonials are authentic, eliminate undisclosed incentives, and ensure full transparency in your processes. This rule signals a new era of accountability in U.S. digital marketing. It’s a chance for companies to demonstrate their commitment to ethical practices and build real, lasting trust with consumers. For those who have always prioritized transparency, this is a welcome change. For others, it’s time to adapt quickly.

LinkedIn is now extending its free verification system beyond its own platform, allowing external sites to integrate LinkedIn verification instead of developing their own. Adobe is among the first to adopt this, integrating LinkedIn verification into its Content Authenticity app and Behance platform. This means that creators who have verified their identity on LinkedIn can display a “Verified on LinkedIn” badge on their profiles, and their verified identity will appear alongside their work when shared through Adobe’s Content Credentials tools. This development addresses the growing issue of online impersonation and aims to bolster trust across platforms. As Oscar Rodriguez, LinkedIn’s VP of Trust, noted, “It’s getting progressively cheaper and easier to pretend you’re someone you’re not online.” By enabling users to carry their verified identity across platforms, LinkedIn and Adobe are taking steps to reinforce authenticity in digital interactions. The move also contrasts with other platforms’ approaches to verification. For instance, Twitter’s verification model shifted to a paid system after Elon Musk’s acquisition, while LinkedIn’s expanded system remains free and focuses on combating online inauthenticity. Other early adopters of LinkedIn’s expanded verification system include platforms like TrustRadius, G2, and UserTesting. As we navigate an increasingly digital world, the ability to verify one’s identity across platforms becomes crucial. This initiative by LinkedIn and Adobe represents a significant step towards reinforcing trust and authenticity in our online interactions. #DigitalIdentity #OnlineTrust #LinkedInVerification #AdobeContentCredentials #AuthenticityInDigitalAge https://lnkd.in/eAX_9BVm

As AI rapidly advances, an emerging critical challenge threatens to weaken the foundations of societal institutions: How can we maintain trust and accountability online when AI systems become indistinguishable from real people? I recently contributed to a paper with 20 prominent AI researchers, legal experts, and tech industry leaders from OpenAI, MIT, Microsoft Research, and the Partnership on AI proposing a novel solution: personhood credentials (PHCs). The implications of widespread AI-powered deception are profound. Our institutions rely on a social trust that individuals are engaging in authentic conversation and transactions. Anything that undermines that trust weakens the foundations for communication, commerce, and government interactions and threatens to erode the basic trust and shared understanding that enables societies to function. Key points: - AI-powered deception is scaling up, threatening societal trust. - PHCs offer optional, privacy-preserving online identity verification. - Users can prove their humanity without revealing personal information. - Trusted entities could issue PHCs, ensuring one-time verification. - This balances human verification needs with robust privacy protection. As AI continues to blur the lines between real and artificial, solutions like PHCs become crucial for maintaining the foundations of trust in our digital world. Blog post: https://lnkd.in/eywU_dpG Paper: https://lnkd.in/ekV4t8GS

Leveraging Verifiable Credentials for Privacy-Preserving Age Verification The Spanish General Secretariat for Digital Administration recently released technical specifications for their new online age verification system, which will use Verifiable Credentials data model to control minors' access to adult content online. But, what are Verifiable Credentials? Verifiable Credentials (VCs) are digital documents that can represent a wide range of claims about an entity (like a person, organisation, or device). These claims can be verified using cryptography, ensuring their authenticity and integrity. Why are they important? 1. Security: Advanced cryptography makes VCs tamper-proof and trustworthy 2. Privacy: You can control what information is shared, preserving your privacy 3. Portability: VCs can be easily stored and shared digitally How do they work? 1. Issuance: A trusted entity (issuer) creates a VC for an individual (holder). 2. Storage: The holder keeps the VC in a digital wallet. 3. Presentation: When needed, the holder shares the VC with a verifier. 4. Verification: The verifier uses cryptography to confirm the VC's validity. Spain has recently released technical specifications for their new online age verification system, aimed at controlling the age of users seeking to access online adult content. In the last few years, different specialists have come to the conclusion that the easy and free access to online adult sexual content is harming kids and teenagers’ mental health and their social and relational skills. Therefore, Spain is planning to limit minors’ access to this type of content by implementing an online age verification procedure. This system will employ W3C Verifiable Credentials to establish a robust, privacy-centric protocol for verifying age of majority. By integrating with European Blockchain Services Infrastructure (EBSI), it will ensure secure and efficient age verification without compromising user identity or tracking data. By applying this data model, the content providers can verify the age of the user without accessing any other personal data, thus minimising the data disclosure and adhering to General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) principles. The key requirement of Spain’s online age verification system is the privacy and untraceability of users’ activity, when presenting their age for verification online. This makes W3C Verifiable Credentials data model the perfect choice for such use-case. You can read the published technical specifications of the project here: https://lnkd.in/dXhgqEYx ---- My name is Tiago Dias, founder of Unlockit on a mission to transform real estate transactions with Blockchain and Open information. By harnessing the power of Verifiable Credentials (VCs), we're simplifying the complex process of document verification. #VerifiableCredentials