The purpose of this deliverable is to pinpoint and explore fundamental difficulties related to identification and trust in the digital world. The idea is to illuminate and analyze them from the perspective of the "virtual person" model, which has been a major research topic in previous FIDIS deliverables.
After an introduction that shows the importance of the topics covered in this deliverable and situate this research with respect to other related FIDIS activities, we give several case studies in order to illustrate how trust, confidence and identification often intervene in today's typical applications on the Internet, i.e., in the digital world. These case studies also show how deeply trust and identification are intertwined. We observe fundamental similarities between the challenges that Amazon, eBay, etc. are faced with in respect to trust and identification in the digital world. We also present some typical counter-measures to overcome these challenges.
In Section 4, the core concepts of trust, confidence and identification are defined and analyzed in both the traditional and the digital contexts. The key concepts are precisely defined in order to guarantee a common language and consistency for the rest of the deliverable. The in-depth analysis and synthesis of current definitions and approaches for trust gives an overview of the state-of-the-art that opens the doors for future research. This scientific analysis and synthesis is first addressed to specialists in trust-related domains, but could be interesting as well for policy makers who need an in-depth understanding of trust mechanisms. The precise definition with a thorough discussion of identification brings the traditional IT approach closer to what is usually adopted in forensic sciences.
Then, we discuss the importance of response mechanisms (social pressure, reputation, legal liability) as trust enablers or to regulate behaviours (to discourage entities from acting in an inappropriate way) to build trust.
Section 6 explores further the close relations between trust and identification: the identification components in trust and the trust components in identification.
Eventually, in Section 7, we discuss how the concepts of trust and identification can be modelled in the digital world and, more generally, in the virtual world in the light of virtual persons.