How motivations of SNSs use and offline social trust affect college students' self-disclosure on SNSs: An investigation in China

Social Networking Sites (SNSs) have been proliferating and growing in popularity worldwide throughout the past few years, which have received significant interest from researchers. Previous literatures on Internet suggest that offline social trust influences online perceptions and behaviors, and there is linkage between trust and self-disclosure in face-to-face context. Adopting the Uses and Gratifications perspective as the theoretical foundation, this exploratory study aimed to address the roles that motivations of SNSs use and offline social trust play in predicting levels of self-disclosure on SNSs. Taking 640 snowballing sampling on Renren.com, the study found that there was an instrumental orientation of SNSs use among China's college students. Social interaction, self-image building and information seeking were three major motivations when college students use SNSs. As expected, the results also indicated that motivations of SNS use and offline social trust play a more important role in predicting self-disclosure on SNSs than demographics. This exploratory study gives an empirical insight in the influence of motivations of SNSs use and offline social trust on self-disclosure online. --Social Networking Sites,Motivations,Self-disclosure,Offline Social Trust

Triggering trust:to what extent does the question influence the answer when evaluating the perceived importance of trust triggers?

Trust is a critical component of business to consumer (B2C) e-Commerce success. In the absence of typical environmental cues that consumers use to assess vendor trustworthiness in the offline retail context, online consumers often rely on trust triggers embedded within e-Commerce websites to contribute to the establishment of sufficient trust to make an online purchase. This paper presents and discusses the results of a series of studies which took an initial look at the extent to which the context or manner in which trust triggers are evaluated may exert influence on the perceived importance attributed to individual triggers. We hope that our investigations will help inform the evaluation approaches adopted to assess consumer trust. © 2009 The Author

Interdisciplinary Trust Meta-Analysis

A meta-analysis of approximately 800 trust articles written from 1966 to 2006 in A+, A, and B journals are structured and analyzed. Contributions from the number of published trust articles, multidisciplinarity, trust objects, trust interactions types, and occurrence of key variables – in addition to the term trust - are deduced

A Novel Zero-Trust Framework to Secure IoT Communications

The phenomenal growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) has highlighted the security and privacy concerns associated with these devices. The research literature on the security architectures of IoT makes evident that we need to define and formalize a framework to secure the communications among these devices. To do so, it is important to focus on a zero-trust framework that will work on the principle premise of ``trust no one, verify everyone'' for every request and response. In this thesis, we emphasize the need for such a framework and propose a zero-trust communication model that addresses security and privacy concerns of devices with no operating system or with a real-time operating system. The framework provides an end-to-end security framework for users and devices to communicate with each other privately. A common concern is how to implement high-end encryption algorithm within the limited resources of an IoT device. We demonstrated that by offloading the data and process heavy operation like audit management to the gateway we were able to overcome this limitation. We built a temperature and humidity sensor and were able to implement the framework and successfully evaluate and document its efficient operations. We defined four areas for evaluation and validation, namely, security of communications, memory utilization of the device, response time of operations, and cost of its implementation, and for each, we defined a threshold to evaluate and validate our findings. The results are satisfactory and are documented

Trust and electronic government website success: An empirical study

Master'sMASTER OF SCIENCE (MANAGEMENT

A Transaction Assurance Framework For Web Service

Trust assurances for customers of online transactions is an important, but not well implemented concept for the growth of confidence in electronic transactions. In an online world where customers do not personally know the companies they seek to do business with, there is real risk involved in providing an unknown service with personal information and payment details. The risks faced by a customer are compounded when multiple services are involved in a single transaction. This dissertation provides mechanisms that can be used to reduce the risks faced by a client involved in online transactions by allowing the him/her access to information about the services involved and control or prescribe how the transaction uses the services. The dissertation uses electronic transactions legislation to ground a trust assurance protocol and minimize the assumptions that have to be made. By basing the protocol on legislation, no information that isn’t already required by law is used in the protocol. A trust assurance protocol is presented so that the client can establish which services are involved in a transaction so that the he/she can begin to determine whether or not he/she is willing to conduct business with the services. A trust model that calculates an assurance measure for services is developed so that the client can automatically establish a measure of trust for a service based on the external perceptions of a service, and his/her own personal experience. A simulation environment was created and used to monitor the services involved in a transaction to evaluate the trust assurance protocol and gain experience with the trust calculation that the client computes. Vocabularies that simplify and standardize descriptions of personal information, business types and the legal structure imposed on Web services offering goods or services online are presented to reduce the ambiguity involved in gathering information from different online sources. The vocabularies also provide a cornerstone of the trust assurance protocol by providing information that is necessary to compute the trust value of a Web service. Results of the trust assurance protocol are obtained and evaluated against the qualitative requirements of providing assurances to clients, and confirms that the protocol is feasible to be deployed, in terms of the overhead placed on a transaction. This dissertation finds that a trust assurance protocol is necessary to provide the client with information that he/she legally has access to and that the trust model can provide a calculable measure of trust that the client can use to compare Web services

A model of key characteristics affecting consumer attitudes toward the usage of free legitimate ad-supported music download services.

Digital music file sharing has had a significant negative financial impact on the recorded music industry, causing multi-billion dollar losses over the past decade. In a world where file sharing is now an activity that can be carried out with ease, industry stakeholders are continuously looking for ways to profit from changing consumer behaviour. To date, literature has looked at why people illicitly download (e.g. motivations, ethical considerations), the financial impact of file sharing (e.g. lost revenue), legal approaches to combatting file sharing (e.g. what approaches work, if any), and new business models for paid services (e.g. price sensitivity, value propositions). Academic literature has thus far largely focused on how to eliminate file sharing and convert illicit downloaders to paid platforms, but has not examined the potential for converting illicit downloaders to a free legitimate, platform. This thesis is the first piece of academic literature to consider free legitimate adsupported music download services as a way of monetizing downloaders free consumption behaviour, specifically by identifying key service characteristics that influence consumers' attitudes toward using such services, and providing a rich contextual understanding of the perceived importance and value of such characteristics. A sequential mixed methods approach was used to explore this topic and develop and validate a conceptual model. The primary research stages consisted of in-depth interviews, group interviews, and an online survey. This thesis shows there is potential for mainstream consumer adoption of free legitimate ad-supported music download services, with the caveat that the services be as good as or better than those (free services) already used. Several characteristics were found to be important influencers of attitudes in this regard. Some characteristics were found to be very important (perception of a large enough music catalogue, freedom of use of downloaded files, delays caused by advertising not being perceived as excessive), some were found to be less important (ease of navigation/use, perceived trustworthiness of the service), and some were found to be not at all important (ability of the service to recommend music, social networking facilitation via the service). While this thesis identifies what an ideal service looks like for consumers, it also finds that tension exists in the economic relationship between consumer behaviour and ideals, and what industry is able to viably deliver in an ad-supported service. The structure and conditions of today's marketplace are such that the fundamental economic viability of free ad-supported music download services is brought into question, irrespective of whether such a service can meet consumers needs. While this thesis is specifically concerned with music download services, the model developed within it could be tested for other online content services such as streaming music or video, and video download services