Information Valuation Policies for Explainable Trustworthiness Assessment in E-Services

Information e-services are useful for exchanging information among many users, whether human or automated agent; however, e-service users are susceptible to risk of inaccurate information, since users have no traditional face-to-face interaction or past relational history with information providers. To encourage use of information e-services, individuals must have technology to assess information accuracy and information source trustworthiness. This research permits automated e-service users—here called agents—acting on behalf of humans, to employ policies, or heuristics, for predicting information accuracy when numerous pieces of information are received from multiple sources. These intuitive policies draw from human strategies for evaluating the trustworthiness of information to not only identify accurate information, but also distinguish untrustworthy information providers. These policies allow the agent to build a user’s confidence in the trust assessment technology by creating justifications for trust assessment decisions and identifying particular policies integral to a given assessment decision.

Legal Challenges of Online Reputation Systems

Online reputation systems have become important tools for supporting commercial as well as noncommercial online interactions. But as online users become more and more reliant on these systems, the question of whether the operators of online reputation systems may be legally liable for problems with these systems becomes both interesting and important. Indeed, lawsuits against the operators of online reputation systems have already emerged in the United States regarding errors in the information provided by such systems. In this chapter, we will take the example of eBay’s Feedback Forum to review the potential legal liabilities facing the operators of online reputation systems. In particular, the applicability of the Canadian law of negligent misrepresentation and of defamation will be covered. Similar issues may be expected to arise in the other common law jurisdictions

Conceptions of Trust

This chapter introduces the fundamental concepts of trust, with emphasis on their applicability to the e-services platform. This sets the tone for this book and creates a platform from which the topics can be explored more deeply in the other chapters. This chapter presents a description of e-services and trust environments, provides the prevailing perspectives on trust, and introduces a unifying definition that can be used for e-services. Furthermore, the indicators that influence a trust decision when e-service invocation is desired, is specified, and the current trust models are highlighted. These models may be leveraged when designing the architecture for an e-service solution. In addition to being a resource during e-service system design, this chapter focuses on making the reader cognizant of the broader technical and management-related issues surrounding trust in e-services, and providing a common platform for discussion.

Two-Layer Models for Managing Distributed Authenticity and Trust

This chapter describes the difficulty of managing authenticity and trust in large open networks. Participants of such networks are usually unknown to each other. Questioning somebody’s authenticity and trustworthiness is thus a natural reflex and an important security prerequisite. The resulting problem of properly managing authenticity and trust is an emerging research topic. The chapter proposes a common conceptual framework and compares it to several existing authenticity and trust models. The goal is to increase the awareness that authenticity and trust are not separable and to promote the corresponding two-layer requirement.

A Survey of Trust Use and Modeling in Real Online Systems

This chapter discusses the concept of trust and how trust is used and modeled in online systems currently available on the Web or on the Internet. It starts by describing the concept of information overload and introducing trust as a possible and powerful way to deal with it. It then provides a classification of the systems that currently use trust and, for each category, presents the most representative examples. In these systems, trust is considered as the judgment expressed by one user about another user, often directly and explicitly, sometimes indirectly through an evaluation of the artifacts produced by that user or his/her activity on the system. We hence use the term “trust” to indicate different types of social relationships between two users, such as friendship, appreciation, and interest. These trust relationships are used by the systems in order to infer some measure of importance about the different users and influence their visibility on the system. We conclude with an overview of the open and interesting challenges for online systems that use and model trust information.

Developing Trust Practices for E-Health

The number of people turning to the Internet to meet their various health needs is rising. As the prevalence of this form of e-health increases, so the issue of trust becomes ever more important. This chapter presents a brief overview of e-health and describes how and why people are using the Internet for health advice and information. In order to understand the trust processes behind this engagement, a staged model of trust is proposed. This model is explored through a series of in-depth qualitative studies and forms the basis for a set of design guidelines for developing trust practices in e-health.

Trust Management Tools

After entering the realm of computing over a decade ago, the term trust management has evolved to encompass many concepts and mechanisms that bring it closer to its intuitive interpretation. This chapter will outline the evolution and present the catalyst(s) for each phase in its metamorphosis. In each stage, trust management tools were constructed to showcase the current understanding in the field. These tools will be discussed and their strengths, domains of application, and scope for improvement presented. The foundation of trust management technology can be found in security notions, for example credentials, in mathematical computation and in formal (and informal) reputation models. Each of these categories and their hybrids will be highlighted. This chapter should leave the reader with (1) a holistic view of the trust management problem, (2) a clear differentiation of trust management from other fields (and terms) in the computer security arena, and (3) knowledge of the appropriate domain of usage for each system.

Holistic Trust Design of E-Services

As a central issue of modern e-services, trust has to be tackled early during the development phases. We present and compare, in this chapter, various works and methodologies that contribute to this aspect. A holistic trust design methodology that combines useful aspects encountered in the existing works is then described in detail. It is based on a systematic analysis of scenarios that describe the typical use of the e-service by using a trust analysis grid. The trust analysis grid is composed of 11 trust issue categories, which cover the various aspects of the concept of trust, and is used to guide the design of the computing system by analyzing and refining the scenarios, and providing hints at the suitability of technologies for the scenario. We illustrate this methodology in several examples.

User-Centric Identity, Trust and Privacy

This chapter introduces entification as a means of allowing the users of e-services to create and manage multiple pseudonyms in a decentralized way; thereby limiting the ability to link transactions and users, whilst mitigating attacks due to the ownership of multiple identities. The entification framework fills the gap between the identity and the computational trust/reputation layers. It is difficult to safely assess linked evidence about multiple virtual identities because there might be overcounting of overlapping trust pieces of evidence. The entification framework uses a new mechanism, called trust transfer, to mitigate this issue, and allows the users to trade privacy for trust. Such a framework is essential in a world where more and more e-services want to rely on user-centric identity management.

Building Consumer Trust for Internet E-Commerce

The growth of the Internet is increasing the deployment of e-commerce B2C services within such areas as e-retailing, e-learning, and e-health. However, a major impediment to the growth of e-commerce on the Internet is the lack of consumer trust in the provider of the e-service (Van Slyke, Belanger, Comunale, 2004). This chapter presents a literature survey of recent contributions to building trust in e-commerce, followed by a description of seven ways for the B2C Internet service provider to build trust in the use of its services among consumers.