To trust or not to trust six recommendations for system feedback in a dynamic environment

Abstract

In today’s rapidly developing Internet, the web sites and services end users see are more and more composed of multiple services, originating from many different providers in a dynamic way. This means that it can be difficult for the user to single out individual web services or service providers and consequently judge them regarding how much they trust them. So the question is how to communicate indicators of trustworthiness and provide adequate security feedback to the user in such a situation. Contemporary literature on trust design and security feedback is mostly focused on static web services and, therefore, only partially applicable to dynamic composite web services. We conducted two consecutive studies (a qualitative and a quantitative one) to answer the questions of how and when security feedback in dynamic web service environments should be provided and how it influences the user’s trust in the system. The findings from the studies were then analyzed with regards to Riegelsberger and Sasse’s ten principles for trust design [24]. The outcome we present in this paper is an adapted list of trust principles for dynamic systems.