Federated Trust

Full Title or Meme

Where Trust is needed by a community of users, one popular method is the creation of a federation of suppliers that take some action to engender trust in the members of the federation.

Context

There are three broad categories of federated trust that can be useful online:

1. A collection of equals banding together to support each other, this is often handled by a non-profit association of those parties.
2. A government mandated operation that requires trust to function, for example public school teachers are vouched by various law enforcement agencies.
3. A large enterprise that leverages its trust to provide services by third parties, for example: Ebay, Yahoo or Amazon, where payment escrow service is included.

Problems

Web Sites

Traditionally federations apples only to Web Sites and users of those sites. In today’s web ecosystem the user is typically carrying a Smart Phoe