Digital Convergence in a Knowledge Society

The concept of trust has been studied significantly by researchers in philosophy, psychology and sociology; research in these fields show that trust is a subjective view that varies greatly among people, situations and environments. This very subjective characteristic of trust however, has been largely overlooked within trust management used in the online social network (OSN) scenario. To date, trust management mechanisms in OSNs have been limited to access control methods that take a very simplified view of trust and ignore various fundamental characteristics of trust. Hence they fail to provide a personalized manner to manage trust but rather provide a “one size fits all” style of management. In this paper we present findings which indicate that trust management for OSNs needs to be modified and enriched and outline the main issues that are being addressed in our current implementation work.