TruthBear Blog
Supporting Multiple Personas: For beliefs you don't want to broadcast
Before I get started, I want to highlight that TruthBear has started collecting sign-ups for our private trial. If you aren't already signed up to receive this blog by email, you can sign up below, and tick the option to be invited to the trial. If you are signed up, then either ping me or click the "Manage my Subscription" link in the email, and select "Private trial invite".
TruthBear is an open network that communities use to work out what they believe about things.
One of the interesting things about our beliefs is that for most people, we have varying levels of comfort being associated with them in different contexts. There are some beliefs that we are happy to state publicly, with our name attached, knowing that they will be visible to everyone forever. For example, and I don't want to be controversial here, but I'm happy to state that I think the sky is blue, and that 2 + 2 is 4.
But some beliefs, we might hold privately, and never express. Or only express to our closest friends. In between that, there are various levels - a bumper sticker or a poster in front of your house publicly displays a belief, but doesn't bind your name to it. Voting allows you to express a belief, but it's done anonymously and not for public display. And so on.
This has a real cost for TruthBear. To be useful, its methodology for working out credibility weights for your network and which topics matter to you relies on you being comfortable expressing what's important to you and what you think about it. But you would probably hesitate to publicly post your views on politics or other contentious subjects, knowing that if they age badly you could be pilloried for them in the future. So it's important for TruthBear to be set up as a faithful confidant.
I wanted to come up with a framework that respects the different "publicness" levels of beliefs. But also it's important to keep things conceptually simple - mental effort spent on understanding a complex epistemological system is effort not spent understanding what is happening in the world. Keeping it simple also helps limit the likelihood of accidental over-disclosure.
The model I came up with is to support people having multiple personas. It's not required for a user to have multiple personas, but it is also not unexpected when they do. This means that a public figure, for example, could have a public persona on which they visibly record their public beliefs, but also they could have a private personal persona, shared with a tighter circle.
This model obviously isn't new in the world. Most people maintain separate work and personal email addresses. Many people have separate social media accounts for different purposes. The difference here is that we are building it in from day one.
From the point of view of the TruthBear open network, your separate personas are just separate identities. There is no difference between two different people with separate identities, or one person with two identities. This means that, in principle, no one can determine that your two separate personas are both the same person (although what you choose to write can always give you away).
The exception to this is the person or company operating the TruthBear server that you use. This is analogous to how Google can see the contents of your Gmail account, because they are the ones operating it. If you want to have one login, with multiple personas, then the TruthBear app will support you - helping to ensure that you don't accidentally publish private beliefs using your public named persona, for example.
If you don't trust the person or company that operates your TruthBear server then there is a continuum of trade-offs between convenience and privacy. You can still register multiple accounts on the same server. If that's not good enough, you could run accounts on different servers, like having a Gmail address and an Apple Mail address, so each operator only ever sees one persona. And finally, you always have the option of self-hosting so no-one sees your unpublished beliefs.
It's worth being frank about the limitations of this system. Every persona is pseudonymous by default. If you want to identify yourself using a persona, you can, either to a select group of friends, or to the world. But that identification is a one-way trip. Once someone knows that you are @Bread_Pitt, it's not possible to put the genie back in the bottle.
There's plenty more to say about beliefs and privacy. We have designed a really nice system that lets you identify yourself to friends, but doesn't let them prove your identity to others without your permission. In the next blog post I'll talk about our Right to be Forgotten implementation, which will let you retract items, on a best-efforts basis.
What I really want to highlight in this post is that TruthBear has a model that is simple because it reflects how we already think about the "publicness" of our beliefs. And it lets you comfortably express the full range of your interests and beliefs, which allows TruthBear to bring you information that's most relevant to you.
I love hearing your good ideas. If you think something here is unclear or just plain wrong, you can help make TruthBear better by telling me: ed@truthbear.org.