[Sigiii-l] New views on trust in our blog discussion

[Aaron Bowen]

Greetings everyone!  With the annual meeting just around the corner I wanted to issue a new call for comments on the SIG-III Blog!  The Blog’s web address is

http://www.neasist.org/icisc/blog/

and in connection to this year’s Global Plaza, I would love to have any and all of your views on what causes someone to trust or not trust the information they receive.  To spark further thoughts and discussion, here is a summary of the discussion we have had thus far on the six questions about trust I posted to the blog:  how do we define trust, how do we measure it, what are its key aspects, e-commerce and data mining, government surveillance, and government censorship.
Discussion of the first question has highlighted the fact that there is no universal definition of trust, and that perceptions of trust are based on localized sociocultural environments.  Building trust accordingly revolves around creating an open social environment that is inclusive and accepting of others – particularly on a localized scale, but beyond that on an international scale as well.  Such an environment will allow members of a society to feel comfortable placing their trust in a society as a whole, and by extension in information generated by that society.  The discussion also branched into the issues of how people think about “culture,” as well as how the Internet and ever-increasing access to digital information is changing perceptions of trust at both individual and collective levels.

The discussion of measuring trust considers the issue of Internet users correlating a webpage’s authority or trustworthiness with its placement in Google search rankings (and notes that such a correlation is a problematic measure of authority or trust).  Responding to the fact that additional information exists in a non-digitized format, one commenter examines the possibility of comparing perceptions of trust in print as opposed to Web-based sources of information, and defining metrics for such a study.
The discussion on the different aspects of trust has identified a large number of different aspects.  So far these include the development of automated software to encourage civic participation and e-governance, the influence of the blogosphere and other media in the political arena and whether the instantaneous info they provide may be trusted, and the ease of access to personal information offered by social networking sites (and related issues of trust, such as being concerned about who may be viewing this personal info as well as popular reactions to recent privacy complaints concerning facebook.com).  Reflecting the many aspects of trust as a concept, the Blog discussion expands down many different avenues.

The discussion on the different aspects of trust also bleeds into the discussion on e-commerce and data mining.  Blog commenters write about the interests of companies collecting data on product sales vs. the privacy interests of consumers, and the conditions under which a person will trust a company with personal purchase data.  This discussion has specifically considered the presence of a 3rd party logo (such as PayPal or VeriSign) in commercial transactions online, personal information that companies collect about who purchases what and privacy policies disclosing what they do with that information, whether they do so at the aggregate or individual levels, and anonymizing Web services that hide data about your surfing habits from data miners.  I particularly like the e-commerce discussion in that it considers both the interests of businesses in data mining and the interests of people who are having their data mined, and presents an open discussion between these two positions.

The government surveillance and censorship topics have raised some provocative discussion of how governments use, protect, or share information about people within their borders.  Issues such as international airlines and railway systems making passenger data available to government bodies, government wiretapping of phones (and possibly Internet connections), and Internet censorship in China have highlighted questions on how governments should be allowed to access, monitor, and/or use personal information.

We welcome your views!  To borrow a thought I mentioned in the most recent SIG-III Newsletter, your ideas on any of the above topics will help enrich our discussion of trust and will keep the Blog fresh and active.  So please, check it out and let us know your thoughts!  Last but not least, if you have any questions or comments please send me a message at asb01 at myuw.net or sigiiiblog at gmail.com.  Thanks!

Aaron