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Trust across Disciplines

Trust & technology - Regarding sociology

In the information era, technology related topics are playing a great role. The number of domains where technical artifacts are filtering human communications and relationships is growing bigger and bigger: Human-Computer Interaction, Computer Supported Cooperative Work, e-commerce or even the simple e-mails are just few examples of this trend. There is no doubt that trust has a major influence whenever we are dealing with these technologies. The importance of trust is twofold because it can be seen as trust towards the technical system (such as in electronic payments) and trust in the technology as a mediator between individuals.

Sociologists studied this topic in a critical way, highlighting the risks that an extensive use of technological solutions could bring in the emerging info-societies.

Helen Nissenbaum

[In online environments] under conditions where many of the usual cues of trust and trustworthiness are missing or obscured [missing identity, missing personal characteristics, missing role definition], how do we sustain trust online? The answer to this question that many people support promotes security and safety as the panacea. Supported by security experts, security-minded systems managers, government oversight bodies and espousers of e-commerce, this answer holds as its objective a perfected toolkit of security mechanisms as the key to ensuring safety for sanctioned participants of the online world. The toolkit would protect these participants against harm to them, their computers, and their information. [...]

We will attain trust through security. This claim has prima facie plausibility because many of the mechanisms function precisely to restore many of the clues and cues lost to appraisal in the online world. This is most easily seen in the mechanisms of identification provides information about the agents with whom people interact and thereby restores some of the cues and clues, including in some cases information about the past record of an agent. These mechanisms also allow for the creation of reliable online reputations. Assuring non-repudiation restores accountability, as does surveillance.

Despite the promise, and despite the clear benefits security promises, [Nissenbaum argues] as a means of engendering trust, security cannot provide the complete answer. [...] Pursuing trust online by pursuing the complete fulfillment of the three goals of security [access control, transparency of identity, surveillance] would no more achieve trust and trustworthiness, online - in their full blown senses - than prison bars, surveillance cameras, airport X-ray conveyers, body frisks, and padlocks, could achieve offline. For the ends envisioned by the proponents of security and e-commerce are contrary to core meanings and mechanisms of trust.

Interpreting trust as security is inadequate in at least two ways: one is that it could lead to a climate that is hostile, not friendly to trust. Interpreting trust as security will diminishes the "quality of life" in the online world by diminishing critical opportunities for forming and nourishing trust.

Common to all the works on trust [...] was a recognition that trusting involves vulnerability. When people trust, they expose themselves risk. [...] Where people are guaranteed safety, where they are protected from harm via assurances, as when the other acted under coercion, for example, trust is redundant, trust is not needed. What we have is certainty, security, safety – not trust. [...] Trust is squeezed out of the picture.

[Moreover] in an environment as extensive, rich and complex as the online world, aiming for safety and certainty above all has a price – namely, limitation. We do not have the means at our disposal of assuring safety at the same time that we are able to benefit from the full richness, opportunity and complexity. [...] The cost of a perfectly secure Cyberspace is a limiting and constraining of what people can do online, the range and nature of activities allowed to them, the freedoms they can experience, and the complexity of relationships and community they can build.

References

Nissenbaum, H. (1999). Can trust be secured online? A theoretical perspective. Etica e Politica. 1, 2. Electronic version available.

Nissenbaum, H. (2001). Securing trust online: wisdom or oxymoron? Boston University Law Review. 81, 3. 635-664. Electronic version available.

Other perspectives on technology

This topic was firstly studied in computer science. You may want to read our contribution about the role that technology should play in trust strategies which is quite similar to the sociological approach summarized here.