Can We Use Trust in Online Dating?

Trust models have been used widely in the literature in a number of different contexts. We examine an emotive scenario where trust would be extremely useful: online dating. We explore the use of a semiring-based trust model with online dating in a social network. Introductions are facilitated by friend-of-a-friend connections in the network in a manner similar to some real world scenarios. We show how ethical and human factors, which are usually not considered, cause problems. We hope that as a result the trust community can work together to formulate new approaches to trust for emotive applications that accommodate ethical and human factors which are difficult to quantify.