Securing Trust Online : Wisdom or Oxymoron?

This essay is about trust in the online world. It is not a manual on how to achieve trust, nor an empirical study of trust's presence or absence online. Rather, it is an attempt to show that the way we stipulate the conditions of the online world may be decisive for whether or not trust is achieved. Applying this perspective to a dominant vision of trust as security, the essay argues that if conditions are wrongly stipulated, then efforts to achieve trust may be misdirected, indeed, even thwarted