How Do Geolocated Apps Try to Reassure You ?

They connect strangers… living just around the corner. Geomatching applications (for donating goods, sharing food, or fostering local solidarity, among other uses) strengthen social ties, help reduce poverty, encourage longer product lifecycles, and contribute to waste reduction. As such, they have the potential to become a powerful lever for achieving the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). But how can users trust an application that relies on sharing their personal data with other individuals?

The 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), established by the United Nations to transform the world by 2030, require broad participation. Many geolocated applications based on peer-to-peer matching offer considerable potential to accelerate this transformation. Today, each SDG can rely on hundreds of “geomatching” initiatives.

For SDG 1 (“No Poverty”), for example, FallingFruit provides foragers with access to more than 4,039 distinct food resources spread across nearly two million locations. GEEV allows users to collect free furniture close to home, while Olio facilitates the sharing of surplus food among neighbours through a community of more than eight million members.

These platforms generate tangible impacts across the three pillars of sustainable development:

Social: they strengthen local solidarity and create new social connections;
Economic: they help reduce poverty and improve people’s daily lives;
Environmental: they reduce waste and extend the lifespan of products.

Inviting a Stranger Into Your Home?

However, these applications rely on the disclosure of personal data, particularly geolocation information, which the European Commission considers especially sensitive. Unlike traditional transactions on platforms such as Leboncoin or Vinted, geomatching applications often involve a face-to-face meeting, sometimes at a private residence.

Visiting a stranger’s home – or welcoming a stranger into your own – is not a trivial matter. The trust users may place in a brand to personalize offers is no longer sufficient. Here, personal data must be shared directly with other users. This need for security helps explain the success of applications such as Gensdeconfiance, which are built around member recommendations.

Perceived risks are reinforced by the broader context: increasing data breaches, the proliferation of misinformation, and identity theft. Internet users remain cautious. According to a 2021 survey conducted by France’s National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies (INSEE) on information and communication technologies, 72% of respondents said they were concerned about the traceability of their online activities. These concerns are amplified by the fact that data breaches reported to the French Data Protection Authority (CNIL) increased by 20% in 2024. As a result, according to INSEE’s 2019 ICT survey, 76% of individuals limited or abandoned online activity because of security concerns.

A Promising Avenue: Social Presence

In response to these concerns, a promising lead is emerging: social presence. This concept refers to the ability of a digital interface to convey a sense of human presence. By making the experience feel more human, social presence reassures users and partially offsets the sense of sacrifice associated with sharing personal data. It gives users the feeling that they are joining an active community rather than entrusting their information to an impersonal digital space.

In practical terms, social presence can be strengthened through community indicators such as:

the number of visits already made to a member’s location;
the quantity of fruit previously harvested;
photographs of the location;
visible and verified user feedback.

Rather than highlighting a user’s “best-sells”, as many platforms do, application design could emphasize real interactions, community contributions, and evidence of activity. This would make the community feel more vibrant, tangible, and therefore more reassuring.

The Ambivalent Role of Algorithms

In geomatching applications, trust does not rely solely on explicit recommendations, as it does on platforms such as Gensdeconfiance. It also depends on this perceived sense of human proximity. Algorithms and artificial intelligence play an ambivalent role in this regard. They can enhance social presence – for example, through socially oriented conversational agents – or, conversely, fuel distrust by reinforcing fears of fake reviews or fictitious profiles. The challenge, therefore, is to design technologies that foster trust rather than erode it.

If these conditions are met, geomatching applications could achieve much wider adoption and make a meaningful contribution to the achievement of all 17 Sustainable Development Goals. So why not start exploring these initiatives today and take action, at your own scale, in support of the planet?

This article is republished from T he Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.