Can Formalism Alone Provide an Answer to the Quest of a Viable Definition of Trust in the WWW Society?

Abstract

Ever since the creation of the first human society, people have understood that the only way of sustaining and improving their societies is to rely on each other for exchanging services. This reliance have traditionally built on developing, among them, trust, a vague, intuitive to a large extend and hard to define concept that brought together people who worked towards the progress we all witness around us today. Today’s society is, however, becoming increasingly massive, collective, and complex and includes not only people, but huge numbers of machines as well. Thus, trust, being already a difficult concept to define and measure when applied to a few people that form a cooperating group or a set of acquaintances, it is far more difficult to pinpoint when applied to large communities whose members may hardly know each other in person or to interconnected machines employed by these communities. In this paper we attempt to take a pragmatic position with regard to trust definition and measurement. We employ several formalisms, into each of which we define a reasonable notion of trust, and show that inherent weaknesses of these formalisms result in an inability to have a concrete and fully measurable trust concept. We then argue that trust in the modern intertwined WWW society must, necessarily, incorporate to some degree non-formalizable elements, such as common sense and intuition.

This work has been partially supported by the ICT Programme of the European Union under contract number ICT-2008-215270 (FRONTS) and by the Open University of Cyprus within the Programme (DYSAT).