TAPESTRY - Trust and Privacy over a Decentralised Social Registry
How can we tell if the identity we are interacting with online is genuine, or a fake account created to scam us ? Trust is fundamental to our digital interactions, when all of which take place between pseudodyms and email addresses that are not necessarily grounded in physical identities.
TAPESTRY is a multi-year project (2016-2020) that combines social scientists, designers and technologists to explore how trust in identity is engendered online, and is developing tools to enable people, businesses and services to connect safely online.
Central to TAPESTRY is the idea of proving the provenance of digital identities, by exploiting the complex “tapestry” of multi-modal signals woven by their everyday digital interactions.
We have developed a technology based upon distributed ledger technology (DLT) and AI that stores these trails of users’ digital activity, enabling users to share portions of it at specific granularities to prove they are trustworthy without giving away excessive information that violates their privacy. In this way we will de-risk the Digital Economy, delivering completely new ways of determining or engendering trust online, and enabling users and businesses to make better decisions about who they trust online.
TAPESTRY is a collaborative project between the University of Surrey Centre for Vision Speech and Signal Processing (CVSSP, Lead) and the Surrey Centre for Cyber Security (SCCS), the Duncan Jordanston College of Art and Design at the University of Dundee, and the Department of Media Communication and Design at the University of Northumbria Newcastle.
If you are interested and would like to read more, check out the project news
TAPESTRY is funded via the UKRI/EPSRC Digital Economy Programme under grant reference EP/P02799X/1.