Friday, January 10, 2003

Implicit Trust and Digital Identity "We believe that many of our human-to-human communications are implicit - that is, the more familiar we are with a person, the better we are at understanding them. We want to determine whether a robot can sense a person's mood and change the way it interacts [with the human] for more natural communications," said Vanderbilt assistant professor Nilanjan Sarkar. Sensitive robots taught to gauge human emotion, EE Times, January 8, 2003 I think one of the large issues with developing a "user friendly" structure for digital identity is this implicit aspect of our communications. We share information based on not just who, but also subtle cues about how trustable that who is. Those cues haven't yet been moved to the digital realm, the digital flavor of implicit communication isn't well understood yet. We can build trust models around roles and relationships but we need to formally define policies about how we can trust the relationship and what the consequences are if that trust is broken. A very awkward, time consuming way of developing the digital equivalent of the implicit webs of trust we use daily in our physical lives. 6:10:21 AM

© Copyright 2006 Russ Savage. Last update: 5/8/06; 9:03:52 PM.