Elevating Beneficence in Cyberspace with Situational Trust

Abstract

There are myriad ways in which people benefit from systems in cyberspace that support such things as positive social interactions, electronic commerce, and automated decision making. However, harm to people and organizations can also occur, through losing privacy, fostering crime and fraud, spreading misinformation, and challenging or violating many ethical standards. Broadly characterized, systems functioning in cyberspace involve people, data, devices, computational resources, controls, and communication infrastructure. As a concept, trust refers to the state of belief in the competence of an entity to act dependably, reliably and securely within a specific situation or context. Trust is a social construct. An acceptable level of trust is essential to meaningful or satisfactory engagement and interaction among people, and, by extension, among any and all cyberspace systems. Building on the ability for entities to monitor data and drive models within contexts of how people engage when interacting with systems, we describe approaches to elevating beneficence and reducing harm and in cyberspace. We include ways in which trust is characterized and measured, relate trust and predictive analytics, and describe the potential for recent technologies like blockchains and cloud systems to help to develop a more beneficent cyberspace.