The Risk Management Group (www.trmg.org) recently published a discussion paper on the emerging risks of social networking. No longer is the threat simply limited to identity theft and personal privacy. “Reputational identity” is becoming an increasingly important part of understanding your customers – and social networking sites and online communities play an increasing role in providing information on who your customers are, who they are linked to, their opinions and the ultimate “trustworthiness” of their transactions.

eBay was one of the first businesses to include a reputation score that enabled buyers to judge whether or not they wanted to do business with the seller. The experience of other buyers was deemed to be the best judge of the seller’s trustworthiness. Nothing new there. Businesses have always built their reputation around customer “word of mouth”. With mass adoption of social networking sites even personal reputations can now be built, or destroyed, almost overnight. Businesses and citizens alike really need to be wary of relying too heavily on the information available – unless they know they can absolutely trust its source.

At GB we are working with clients to understand how reputational identity can be built into our identity management solutions. Identity information now goes much further than a simple name, address and date of birth. Reputational identity, along with buying and browsing behaviour, will become an increasingly important part of the knowledge store a business has on its customers. The first step is knowing you can trust the person - or the opinion - that built the reputation in the first place.