Trust online is an interesting phenomenon. How do you make judgements about people who, much of the time, you have never met? Come to that, how do you make trust judgements about people that you have met? All the best conmen are, surely, the most plausible?
I have just installed a small piece of software, which adds a Microsoft-targetted search option to the Google search bar in Firefox 0.8. It's written by somebody called Jason Alexander who I had never heard of and is installed from one of the least informative Web pages, Mozilla FireFox Google Microsoft Search Plugin . [I guess I just have to hope he isn't as famous, to the blogging community anyway, as Walt Mossberg, Who is Walt Mossberg? .]
Why did I take the chance that this utility might be some form of spyware, adware or whatever? Because it was recommended by Scoble, Mozilla plugin for looking up Microsoft resources . On reflection, did Scoble really "recommend" it? Well, his words don't actually do that. But if he mentions a utility isn't he implicitly recommending it if he doesn't say caveat emptor?
The non-binary issue of trust has also come up recently in relation to "friendship rings" (call them what you will) like Orkut . I was interested in Chris Anderson's post, Marc in Orkut where he dissociated himself from Marc Canter, Marc's Voice . As far as I can gather Chris didn't have anything against Marc. But "friend-spam" is something that we can very probably do without. Or should that be "aspiring-to-friend spam"?
There are are raft of other friendship or community or social something sites springing up. Orkut, orkut , is one. Linked In, Welcome to LinkedIn , amusingly uses https for its home page. What does that say about trust? AlwaysOn, AlwaysOn Home , is another.
Are these new sites providing a "service" or taking control of some aspects of "my" life. Do I trust them to do that?
Surely my relationships, online or offline, with different individuals span a spectrum, including such terms as "vaguely know of", "know of", "know their technical competence", "trust their technical judgement", "trust them with my source code" and "trust them with my life"? One of the odd things, of course, is that in extreme situations you are likely to actually trust your life to somebody you don't know at all, such as a member of an emergency service.
Trust is not straightforward either online or, dare I say it, in the "real world".
Posted by Andrew Watt at February 20, 2004 11:33 AM