Why Online Verification Tools Like ClarityCheck Are Vital To Building Digital Trust
Online trust has changed, and verification has become a normal, responsible step.
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Online digital interactions with unknown individuals have become increasingly common alongside the growth of online communications in general. This development isn’t necessarily a surprising one, but it has changed the ways people interact online, especially when it comes to ID verification.
Given how popular the online verification tool ClarityCheck.com is for these kinds of tasks, the platform has collected a significant amount of user behavioral data detailing how and why users verify others online. This information and the trends they inform may prove valuable as concepts like open-source intelligence (OSINT) become part of everyday life.
Notable Trends in Verification Habits
For context, ClarityCheck is a platform that allows users to verify the identities of others. Importantly, the tool does so by exclusively pulling information from publicly available sources that ClarityCheck’s users would be able to access anyway. Clarity Check states that through methodology, online verification is facilitated without breaching ethical boundaries or putting anyone’s private personal info at risk.
According to the platform’s behavioral data, many users run multiple searches in one session after a first result raises additional questions. In practice, this sometimes looks like a user looking up an unrecognized phone number, only to realize that the number may belong to someone they went to high school with. To make certain this is the case, the user then looks deeper for more details—like who the caller’s relatives are—via data available on social media.
Other times, users return weeks after making their first verification to re-check a contact after renewed communication. This may look like a user corroborating information given on a date to verify whether they were being truthful.
Per ClarityCheck’s data, mobile-first verification habits appear to have changed the most dramatically, with many of the platform’s users utilizing it to verify missed or unknown calls, especially when they feel suspicious for one reason or another.
In this way, ClarityCheck’s findings suggest verification is becoming a supplement to intuition, giving users a way to check their concerns against real data. This may be why ClarityCheck and other verification platforms see extensive use in dating, as verification gives individuals a way of mitigating the risk of catfishing and other fraudulent social schemes that the internet has inadvertently enabled.
Integrating OSINT into Everyday Life
ClarityCheck’s popularity suggests that (OSINT) has, for better or worse, become a regular consequence of using the internet, particularly as social media continues to work its way into everyday life. While there are plenty of positive outcomes associated with OSINT’s modern-day prevalence—gauging security risks, satisfying general curiosity, using publicly available information for research purposes—there are some downsides to having one’s personal information made so easily accessible, even if that information was voluntarily provided at one point.
Today, online verification and online verification platforms are an integral part of living in such a heavily digitized world, and there’s little doubt that fact will have implications for what it means to trust others online in the years to come.