User:Zuhui//Personal Reader/Beyond Follows: Trust In Computing

Beyond Follows:Trust in Computing by Sarah Friend
(also look for: Computing with Trust: Definition, Properties, and Algorithms by Jennifer Golbeck)

Recommended by Manetta, I really like the text. It overlaps with my interest in how technology is designed to shape our trust in information from journalistic media to online communities, and its consequence.

The text analyzes how we build and show trust in the digital space, and how trust models change depending on how we consume information. author suggests that by examining network structures, we can notice common patterns across different technological contexts, which can lead to better model and understanding the choices we face. also stresses the need for more elaborate systems to better reflect trust quality.

Trust is a felt quality of human relations, ephemeral and changing.
To turn trust into data might seem wrong, like pinning the butterfly – but the butterfly is getting pinned all the time.

When you follow someone on Twitter or upvote someone’s post on Reddit, semantically these are both small gestures of trust for the person being followed or for the post. To parrot Guy Debord, social media is not a series of interactions with technology, it is a social relation among people, mediated by technology.

From reciprocal to directed trust

What has changed about us as people using the internet that leads from reciprocal to directed trust?

When we see reciprocal trust in platforms created more recently, it is often because they make no attempt at being publicly browsable. Trust is still treated as reciprocal when we imagine the accounts we’re trusting as contacts; they map loosely onto “people” (i.e.,accounts) and are treated like an online extension of who we know in real life.

Trust is directed when we have shifted from trusting people to trusting information (or wanting to see content) shared by people. The shift from trusting people to trusting information, and from reciprocal to directed trust, may lead to increasing inequality in the distribution of attention.

binary and weighted trust

Binary form of trust, meaning trust is either present or it is not.
We see binary trust on most major social media networks. I either follow you or I do not. With this model, there is no gray middle ground of trust, and the platform allows no expressive potential for the quality of trust.

The alternative is weighted trust, which most people are familiar with in the context of a rating system (like uber, amazon, even rotten tomato etc).

PGP(pretty good privacy), Web of Trust

Possibly the oldest formalized example of a weighted trust network is also one of the oldest formalized trust networks, period. It’s called the web of trust and originated with PGP. Created in 1991, PGP stands for Pretty Good Privacy and is a tool for encrypting messages like emails. It was designed to be able to keep communication secret without a central authority to verify identity and therefore aid trust.

This web of trust allows everyone to see who is trusted, and by whom, so they can better make decisions about which accounts to trust themselves.

global and local trust

The concepts of “global trust” and “local trust” each have their own advantages and disadvantages.
(basically when the scope of trust is either too broad or too narrow)
also, they represent two perspectives on how we perceive and build trust in one another.

글로벌 신뢰

• 네트워크의 전체적인 시각에서 특정 개인이나 정보의 신뢰도를 평가
• "누가 보더라도 신뢰할 수 있는 공통된 기준"을 의미하며, 글로벌 수준에서 검증된 정보(예: 유명 미디어, 공인 기관)를 포함
• 예: 구글에서 “신뢰할 만한 뉴스”로 표시되는 콘텐츠, 소셜미디어등에서 인증 배지를 받은 계정
  

로컬 신뢰

• 네트워크 내에서 개별 노드(사용자)가 자신의 직접적인 관계를 통해 신뢰를 형성
• "개인의 경험과 관계를 바탕으로 한 신뢰"이며, 특정 집단이나 공동체에서만 신뢰할 수 있는 대상(예: 친구, 가족, 지역 커뮤니티)
• 예: 지역 커뮤니티의 추천, 친구 추천 시스템

비유하자면, 글로벌 신뢰는 "세계적으로 유명한 음식점의 평점"과 같고, 로컬 신뢰는 "내가 자주 가는 동네 맛집의 평판"과 같다.

global trust and Sybil attacks

How might one calculate a global trust score? The simplest way would be to add up all the records of inbound trust and find an average, but this would be easy to manipulate. In the case of PageRank, that could look like creating thousands of simple web pages that do nothing but link back to a page you’re trying to boost.
Attempts to hijack a network and artificially inflate the seeming importance of one node are called, in the general form, Sybil attacks. Any system that wants to use a global trust score must have defenses against them.

Sybil attacks are the reason some blockchains use energy-intensive mining algorithms, or proof of work. The high energy use makes the creation of many “fake” identities useless, since ability to control the network isn’t tied to the quantity of fake identities but instead to their computational power, which has a material cost. While there are, of course, environmental externalities outside the scope of this article and also alternate solutions to the Sybil problem, proof of work is one of the ways to make this kind of attack prohibitively expensive.

transivity and subjectivity

Each node in a network has a location and a local view of trust. We can think of the utility of shifting between global and local as a question about “how transitive we think trust is” and, secondarily, what kinds of subjectivities are involved in the network’s particular semantic meaning of trust.

전이성

A가 B를 신뢰하고, B가 C를 신뢰한다면, A도 C를 신뢰할 수 있을까?

if I trust you, do I also trust the people you trust?
Or do I trust them less than I trust you, but still a little?
How many levels outward does my trust ripple before it has fully dissipated?

글로벌 신뢰의 전이성

• 글로벌 신뢰 모델에서는 특정 신뢰할 만한 기관(정부, 대기업, 미디어)이 신뢰하면, 다수의 사람들이 이를 자동으로 받아들인다. 그러나 신뢰의 전이성이 강하면 검증 없이 잘못된 정보가 확산될 위험이 있음.

로컬 신뢰의 전이성

• 로컬 신뢰는 관계 기반으로 형성되므로 전이성이 제한적이다. ("내 친구가 추천한 사람을 신뢰할 수 있을까?" - 직접적인 경험이 없으면 신뢰하지 않을 가능성이 큼). 신뢰의 범위가 제한적이며 새로운 관계 형성이 어려울 수 있음.

신뢰의 전이성을 높게 평가할수록 글로벌 신뢰는 강해지고, 반대로 전이성이 낮다면 로컬 신뢰의 중요성이 더 커지게 된다.

주관성

신뢰는 매우 주관적인 요소를 포함하며, 그 의미가 사람마다 다를 수 있다.

글로벌 신뢰의 주관성 문제

• 글로벌 신뢰는 다수의 평가나 공통된 기준을 따르기 때문에, 개개인의 가치나 선호가 무시될 수 있다. 문화적 차이와 개인의 신념이 반영되지 않는 획일적 모델이기 때문. 가령, 글로벌한 신뢰 점수가 높은 인물이 특정 문화권에서는 신뢰받지 못할 수 있는 것과 같음(유명 정치인이 특정 국가에서만 불신받는 경우).

로컬 신뢰의 주관성 문제

• 로컬 신뢰는 개인적 경험에 의해 형성되므로 객관성이 부족할 수 있다.(가령, 특정 그룹에서는 잘 알려진 사람이지만, 다른 커뮤니티에서는 완전히 신뢰할 수 없는 존재일 수 있는 경우) 이는 신뢰의 적용 범위가 제한되며, 외부인에게 신뢰를 확장하기 어려움.

questions

overall, the problem of local trust is that range is very limited, also could easily create filter bubble.
whereas global trust is fast spread and has wide range of coverage but it flattens individuality.

It seems possible that too much globality in terms of trust leads to loss of granularity and silencing of difference, and too much locality leads to a disturbing filter-bubble effect.

Some questions: Is a possible mitigator of polarization to make trust more transitive? And more philosophically, is the concept of a global trust score in some ways always embedding a singular concept of truth into the systems that use it?