Exploiting Trust in Bad Faith

Trust has been researched from various perspectives, focusing mainly on interpersonal trust in a traditional world of face-toface interaction. Nowadays, technology has changed the ways people interact with each other, and thus the way trust is established or destroyed. Increasingly often we interact with representations of others mediated through technology rather than with people or organizations themselves. This changes the environmental cues we rely on when assigning trust to others. In the current state of affairs, there is a mismatch between how we assign trust in technical environments on the one hand and how we should reasonably assign trust on the other hand, considering how technology works or fails to work. This mismatch is exploited in semantic attacks. This paper examines four brief case studies of such semantic attacks.