Communications of the ACM - Special issue: RFID
Quantifying and qualifying trust: spectral decomposition of trust networks
FAST'10 Proceedings of the 7th International conference on Formal aspects of security and trust
Privacy revelations for web and mobile apps
HotOS'13 Proceedings of the 13th USENIX conference on Hot topics in operating systems
Why trust seals don't work: a study of user perceptions and behavior
TRUST'12 Proceedings of the 5th international conference on Trust and Trustworthy Computing
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Widely-used online "trust" authorities issue certifications without substantial verification of recipients' actual trustworthiness. This lax approach gives rise to adverse selection: The sites that seek and obtain trust certifications are actually less trustworthy than others. Using a new dataset on web site safety, I demonstrate that sites certified by the best-known authority, TRUSTe, are more than twice as likely to be untrustworthy as uncertified sites. This difference remains statistically and economically significant when restricted to "complex" commercial sites. In contrast, competing certification system BBBOnline imposes somewhat stricter requirements and appears to provide a certification of positive, albeit limited, value.