Expert Reactions: Mark Adams, Principal
Trust is a very real thing to people engaged in biomedical informatics, as it is for those involved in finance. The “shalls” and “shall nots” of systems managing that kind of data represent critical (and often life- and money- threatening) risks for participating individuals. As such, we are obligated to closely examine exactly what we mean by “trust” in this kind of transaction, and ensure that the participants understand what is happening and why around systems that manage and validate that trust. This is obviously challenging when you consider that most of the users of these systems are in no way experts on security, identity, software, etc...
Mark Adams: Nevertheless, it is a critical consideration not unlike how potential participants in a clinical trial are made aware of the potential risks and benefits of that activity as part of the “consent” process. Such consent is gained only after the participant can be demonstrated to understand (sometimes very sophisticated) science and medicine. The development of consent forms and the associated process is an art, but one that is really essential to ethically carrying out medical research. In the same way, making what Dr. Voas calls the “trust equation” understandable to the users of a trusted system is key to ensuring widespread adoption of trusted systems where they really matter.
Transcript from Dr. Jeff Voas (1:28sec)
[18:34] what is trust? I mean, until you actually can come up with a definition basically-- if you think of trust it really deals a lot, like I said before, with context. It also deals with issues of what are the shall not’s? What “shall not” a particular system do as opposed to what “shall” a system do? We spend so much time in terms of, like, functionality trying to build a system to do exactly-- we want it to do “x, y and z.” But there are a lot of things we don’t want the system to do. That’s a huge part of the trust equation. So if you want to build on-line environments that actually enable or foster this notion of trust you have to have a definition that encompasses not just the “shall’s” but the “shall not’s” and those sorts of entities. So I think it goes back to that and once you nail that down, and assuming you can nail that down, I’m not saying you can ever nail down a definition of trust in a non-physical, digital world. That’s going to be a hard thing to do. I mean, I think that’s just the reality. However, having said that, as long as you can put boundaries around it and you can bound the problem, and I’m a huge arguer for how do you actually bound a problem in such a way that you can get some traction to solve some portion or some part or piece of it, then actually you can get somewhere. But if you’re always talking about these really high-level platitudes types of statements where, you know, we just want everything to work well, we want everything to work great and fine and do what we want it to do, we can’t get anywhere from there.
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