Users and Trust in Cyberspace (Transcript of Discussion)

I did my PhD in decentralised authorisation, but I guess now I’m jumping right through the rat hole of this conference by speaking about trust. I’m trying to look at trust from a psychological point of view, not so much from the technical point of view, and trying to point out some of the observations that have been made about how users perceive trust in cyberspace. I am presenting work that I am doing with one of my PhD students, Kristiina Karvonen. She is doing research on what trust is from the user’s point of view in the Web, but I am more interested in how we could generalise these issues to uses of computer communications other than the Web, and how we could possibly make computers understand trust in some limited sense. First I am going to speak a little bit about our motivations, then try and define what wemean with the word trust (and I hope it is an acceptable definition even though it’s a limited one), and then I’m going to tread on thin ice and try to contemplate whether we could make computers understand trust in this limited sense. It seems to be a fact that the Web is getting everywhere and, at least in Finland, everybody these days has to have a cellular telephone. Teenagers are the most active cell phone user group in Finland, sending short messages to each other all the time, and some schools have banned cell phones altogether. Even primary school kids have cell phones, and this has a number of privacy concerns that make me think really hard. How could I change the world so that when my daughter comes to the age that she wants to have a cell phone that the operator doesn’t get all the information about her habits and friendships and so on? And in the more distant future it seems to be that these kind of devices will get integrated into our clothing and jewellery and maybe some people will turn into cyborgs! Now when we are starting to look at security concepts from that point of view, instead of an organisational point of view, so we are speaking about protecting the personal data and privacy in this kind of connected world, then we get quite a different view to what is trust, and whom should we trust, and whom have we to trust. That’s what we are trying to address. From this point of view it seems that when we are speaking about trust, it’s first that trust implies lack of knowledge; so trust is a special kind of belief meaning that when we make a trust decision, when we decide to believe, it has quite a heavy emotional load from the psychological point of view. We make a commitment in trusting and we make ourselves more vulnerable when we decide to trust something or somebody. So we made ourselves dependent and when we are speaking about computers it seems that trust implies that we made a decision that our attitudes or perception towards the computer system is that we decide