To protect its hosts, Airbnb is now using an AI-powered tool to scan the internet for clues that a guest might not be a reliable customer. According to patent documents reviewed by the Evening Standard, the tool takes into account everything from a user's criminal record to their social media posts to rate their likelihood of exhibiting "untrustworthy" traits -- including narcissism, Machiavellianism, and even psychopathy. The background check tool is the work of Trooly, a startup Airbnb acquired in 2017. When the Evening Standard asked Airbnb to comment on the extent to which it uses Trooly's tool, it declined. However, Airbnb's website does note the company's use of AI to rate potential guests: "Every Airbnb reservation is scored for risk before it's confirmed. We use predictive analytics and machine learning to instantly evaluate hundreds of signals that help us flag and investigate suspicious activity before it happens."

You may think you're a great judge of character, but how much do you really know about someone after a single meeting? Despite the importance of trust in any relationship, business or otherwise, it can be hard to ascertain, especially in a short period of time. So to help you make better, more informed decisions about people you may want to work with, tech company Trooly has launched its Instant Trust rating service, which claims to help "businesses verify, screen, and predict trustworthy relationships and interactions." It's all based on machine learning and the wealth of information available within your digital footprint, and Trooly says it hopes to fill the "trust gap" that results from the "speed of modern commerce and community." Available to both businesses and consumers, Trooly uses data that is generally publicly available to better understand an individual's -- or a company's -- personality and behavior traits.

Trust greases the wheels of the sharing economy, paving the way for transactions to take place between total strangers. But figuring out who is trustworthy and who is not remains a sticky bottleneck for digital businesses wanting to scale faster. Meanwhile the consequences for customers when startups screw up these risk calculations can be very unpleasant indeed. The traditional route to assessing risk is to run a full background check on an individual -- a process that can be time-consuming and expensive, given it can involve sending an actual person to an actual courthouses to parse actual paper records. Which is why, in recent years as sharing economy businesses have been gunning to scale up, other entrepreneurs have spotted an opportunity to step in to offer online services for verifying identity and screening for unsavory behavior, to try to steal a march on more established but slower paced background checkers.

Trust greases the wheels of the sharing economy, paving the way for transactions to take place between total strangers. But figuring out who is trustworthy and who is not remains a sticky bottleneck for digital businesses wanting to scale faster. Meanwhile the consequences for customers when startups screw up these risk calculations can be very unpleasant indeed. The traditional route to assessing risk is to run a full background check on an individual -- a process that can be time consuming and expensive, given it can involve sending an actual person to an actual courthouses to parse actual paper records. Which is why, in recent years as sharing economy businesses have been gunning to scale up, other entrepreneurs have spotted an opportunity to step in to offer online services for verifying identity and screening for unsavory behavior, to try to steal a march on more established but slower paced background checkers.