I'm a nervous flyer. I've been trying to get better over the years, and I'd never let it stop me from actually going anywhere, but I jump at turbulence, and I certainly can't ever get relaxed enough to do anything like sleep. I avoid red eye flights if at all possible, and try to sit over the wing.

Something that's helped is the US government's Aviation Weather Center, and sites that use derivative maps, like Turbulence Forecast. When I'm not surprised by turbulence - I know it's going to show up during part of the flight path - I'm much less nervous about it. The same goes for in-flight interactive maps; if I know I'm flying over a mountain range, for example, I know there will be updrafts which might cause some choppiness as the air warms and cools.

Now that so many of us are connected to each other, the web has the potential to do that for our lives. Job applicants can get turbulence reports on sites like Glassdoor. Entrepreneurs can get turbulence reports on sites like Quora and The Funded. Women can avoid predatory men on dating sites using apps like Lulu.

Just as I don't know which pilots for which airlines submitted turbulence reports, the reviews on all of these sites are anonymous. However, airlines have the benefit of being regulated and tracked; we know that each turbulence report is almost certainly real. That's not necessarily true with anonymous feedback sites. The potential for harm on all of the above is greater, although Quora is very well-moderated. Yet at the same time, a "real names" policy is not sensible. Imagine if all whistleblowers had to use their real identity. For lots of reasons, including safety and user comfort, I am very much against "real names" policies in most online spaces.

Correspondingly, the challenge is to establish trustworthiness in anonymous communications, preferably with a cloak of plausible deniability. You should be able to feel free to leave a comment about a person or organization without leaving your identity with anyone, and we (as readers) should be able to trust that information. If someone points a finger at you for making the post, you should be able to plausibly say that it wasn't you, to avoid recriminations. Finally, if I'm the subject of the post and someone is attempting to smear me with false information, I should be able to take action to remove the comment, and have protection against denial of reputation attacks, where distributed mobs of people endlessly post false information. There are, to be sure, ethical problems with many of these services as they stand; effective reliability, anonymity and redress would mitigate them.

These are hard problems to solve. Full transparency does not cover everyone; sometimes deliberate opacity can be protective. This touches identity, network security, trust metrics and social algorithms - and, of course, would need to be wrapped up in an easy-to-use interface to be useful.

All of us are, one way or another, sitting at the gate, wondering if our journey is going to be bumpy. Hopefully, we can help each other out.