Trust in Computer Systems and the Cloud

CHAPTER 2Humans and Trust

As Richard Harper points out in his preamble to a collection of essays on trust, computing, and society,¹ much of the literature around trust is not really about trust at all, but about mistrust. It is the setting up—and maybe the demolishing—of a trust relationship that could be labelled as mistrust; and given the consequences of its failing, getting this part right is important. If you take a simple view of trust as something which is binary—it is either there or it is not—rather than considering it as a more complex relationship or set of relationships, then the area which is not black and white, but tinged with complications, is what is relevant.

That is what could fairly be labelled, within the literature, as mistrust.

It would be nice to believe that we can take a reductionist view of trust, which allows us to follow this lead, moving all the complicated parts into a box labelled mistrust and having a well-defined set of parts we need to consider that are all just about trust; but we saw in the previous chapter that trust is itself complex. We certainly do want to get to a clearer, more refined definition, but we first need to delve deeper into what trust looks like and how it is defined in the various spheres of relevant academic study. Although our interest is less in the human-to-human realm than in trust relationships that involve computer systems (whether human-to-computer or computer-to-computer), it is important to understand the theoretical ...