Usable Trust: Grasping Trust Dynamics for Online Security as a Service

This paper aims to unravel the intricacies of the mechanisms of trust vis-à-vis ICTs and the contextual logic guiding user deployment and experience, necessitating a view of trust in the digital realm as a dynamic process. Trust models tend to highlight ‘well-placed trust’ in their focus on drawing out (sub)components of (perceived) trustworthiness as attributes of the trusted system or party from the trustor’s stance. However, less attention has been given to the trustworthy attributes, or behavior of the trusted actor. Therefore, this paper sets out to explore this linkage between ICTs and different trust-related user experiences guided by different sets of trustor attributes. In order to explore the conceptual dynamics, a two-step approach is deployed. On the basis of empirical data attention is drawn to trust levels and user segments. Preliminary insights are yielded into the trustors’ segmentation validity and trust estimation accuracy by performing a small-scale experiment in the context of a fictitious online security service.