Activities
Inventor
Net Trust: Informing Trust Decisions
Description:The Tech Talk Overview descibes how Net Trust works. Current trust mechanisms are built for computers, not humans, despite the reams of available research on human trust decisions. In fact, the most common trust devices (e.g., seals, domain names) require the cooperation of the malicious to function. We have developed a system to use social networks to inform trust decisions. Initial users tests show that Net Trust alters trust behaviors, providing information to people that makes them more trusting of some sites and less trusting of others.
Author
Economics of Identity Theft: Causes, Consequences and Possible Cures
NOW IN PRINT Order here.
How is the digital networked environment critically different from the world of paper, eyeballs and pens?
How can the observations about the profound divide between ink and bits be applied to the immediate problem of identity theft?
After these question, an overview of the technology and proposals for identity management, comes a series of possible futures. Examination of these futures indicates that there are two choices: surveillance, near term profits, and long term fraud versus near term expense, private secure credentials, and long term stability.
Innovative Research
Computer Security is Risk Communication
Want Technically Naive People to Security? Talk to them in their own terms..
Individual security solutions have not been adopted even when individuals have expressed their desire to do so. Our experiment suggests one contributing factor is that the rich array of metaphors used by computer security profesionals fail to align with individual's mental models. Speking of phishing
, worms
, and infections
is not communicating with individuals.
Experimentor
Other work available here.
Want Security? Build Privacy.
There is some question as to why end users do not adopt security technologies. We argue that this is typical of users to behave in certain trust ways, and in particular to be concerned when a coal worker dies versus a sky diver. Here is Trust on the Web, a Tale of User Deceit.