Trust Technology

Trust Technology also known as TrustTech is any type of tech that enhances and propagates trust in personal, social, and business settings. It is the creation, facilitation, stabilization, and quantification of trust between people.

TrustTech facilitates dynamic systems of inter-personal relationships. It maintains the balance of community systems, as well as commercial and social relationships between people.

Overview
TrustTech involves companies, platforms, and services that are made possible by trusting relationships between people. The term TrustTech was coined by Javelyn Technologies, and it encompasses the mission of all its companies, particularly "Ognio" which is a hyperlocal PropTech platform.

TrustTech is the result of technological advancements which make more people participate in trust relations in a new way. Previously, face-to-face contact, letters, and storytelling were the primary means of transferring knowledge. Because technology is evolving, the relationships of person-to-person and between users and technology changes, people are now hyper-connected. Furthermore,the geospatial context where relationships take place is urbanising, as the UN predicts that 50% of the global population will live in urban environments by 2050. People have moved from interaction in the physical world to the virtual one, and they, therefore, need a way to create confidence in truth and trustworthiness in an online environment.

The utility of TrustTech is based upon the need for trust in human relationships and businesses which remains despite an increase in anonymity, driven by the increasing urbanisation and digitization of daily life. TrustTech responds to the desire to verify the reliability of individuals, groups of people, businesses and services. New systems, technologies, and business models are built around this new requirement for trust distribution.

Benefits
TrustTech helps to build more trust in personal and business situations through allowing people to make more relationships. It also enables people to maintain dynamic relationships based on trust. TrustTech is about the evolution of human interaction in densely populated places and in relation to new technology and the role of trust in that context.

Wider view
TrustTech is part of a broader sphere of systems of trust. For example, some systems focus on mitigating trust and reducing perceived risk. Contract law is an example of such a system. The checks and balances in politics and government are an example of other systems of mitigating trust.

TrustTech is about technological systems of trust. There are technologies that focus on mitigating trust or increasing trust. Ognio falls into the latter subcategory because it’s about building rapport between people in hyperlocal spaces. Apps like Trustpilot and Yelp could also be considered types of TrustTech that gather and disseminate information among large groups of people in a reliable manner.

TrustTech also works differently in different industries. Fintech, Insurtech and Regtech are closely related and highly regulated industries. They function efficiently because of trust created by heavy regulation.

Blockchain, a new kind of TrustTech, posed a radical disruption to these established industries. Blockchain is anonymous and fully transparent, posing a potentially more trustworthy alternative to traditional finance. TrustTech can dramatically alter the course of industries.

TrustTech companies
There are companies that could be described as TrustTech. Listed in the following categories are some of them:

Travel and accommodation

 * Airbnb
 * Vayable

Property (PropTech)

 * Ognio

Ridesharing, carsharing and transport

 * DriveNow
 * Getaround
 * Lyft
 * Sidecar
 * Spinlister
 * Turo

Reviews and advice

 * LivePerson
 * Trustpilot

Other specialist goods and services

 * DogVacay
 * Lyfeline
 * Pidge
 * TaskRabbit
 * Zaarly
 * Provenance

Online marketplaces and delivery services

 * Instacart
 * Postmates
 * Sharetribe

Future of TrustTech
The future of TrustTech touches on areas such as Artificial Intelligence, Cybernetics, Machine learning, Transhumanism, and the ethics of trust in relation to these immanent technologies.