An Australian entrepeneur is close to finalising deals with a number of major websites, including eBay, Amazon, Facebook, Flickr, LinkedIn and Friends Reunited before launching “www.hundredpoints.com”. The site’s name derives from the Australian banking concept of requiring “100 points” of documentation to establish your identity when opening a new bank account. Particular documents that could be used establish a person’s identity are given a point value, such that no single document would be enough to verify you. These could include a passport, driver’s licence, student ID, birth certificate, Medicare card, etc.
Hundredpoints.com takes this same concept and applies it to the Internet. “Websites and Internet users are so exposed these days. There’s that old cartoon from the early ’90s “On the Internet, Nobody Knows You’re a Dog” – and it’s still so true today! Sexual predators, paedophiles, fraudsters and criminals are able to set themselves up at will on sites like Myspace and Skype and, if they are discovered, just setting themselves up again,” said the site’s founder Dirk Bronte.
So how will the service work?
“Basically, we will be a central repository to provide 100 points for new sites to verify their new users, and also provide greater peace of mind for other Internet users,” said Dirk. “We are at the point where many Internet users have developed long histories on various sites like eBay and Amazon, and they should be able to use this history to establish themselves as trustworthy identities new and emerging sites, such as the emerging powerhouses like Facebook.”
Essentially, hundredpoints.com will allow users to register and provide information on their various user profiles to establish an “Internet identity”. They can then use hundredpoints.com as their identification when they register for new sites. That way, information such as their eBay rating, statistics on their network of contacts on LinkedIn or their reviewer ranking on Amazon will be associated with their user profile on every new site for which they sign up. Users will also be able to beef up their existing profiles on sites like eBay with statistics from these other sites, updated in real-time.
“It’s ridiculous that we are still in the same situation on the Internet that we were in in the 1990s where it is possible to hide your identity on the Internet,” says Dirk. “And I’m not saying that we need to know who you are in the traditional sense, I just want to know that if I am dealing with you over the Web that I know you are a ‘Net citizen with a history and track record I can trust. I mean, think about the number of people living in SecondLife these days – you can be whatever crazy avatar you want to be, but I would be much more comfortable knowing that you have a feedback score of 200 and a 98% positive rating on eBay, and you have 68 connections on LinkedIn.”
