Consumer data breaches. Government agencies hacked. Misinformation campaigns. Now more than ever, trust is a critical issue and one of the greatest challenges organizations and their customers face.
In a recent article appearing in business media brand Fast Company, McIntire Professor Ryan Wright and his co-authors Sahil Sanghvi and Julie McPherson of cyber-focused management consulting firm Booz Allen discuss three important areas of technology where trust is a growing problem—and corresponding tactics being incorporated to safeguard those values to ensure user trust in brands and governments alike.
“Emerging Approaches for Rebuilding Trust in Digital Society” explores concerns impacting value, reliability, and ethics. Respectively, Wright and his co-authors ask if products or services provide customers with value that matches or exceeds the risk of sharing their data; if organizations are, at their core, competent enough to maintain customer security and privacy; and if organizations practice ethical principles that align with customer values, being transparent about the benefits and costs of collecting information from their customers.
To answer these looming questions, Wright, Sanghvi, and McPherson point to techniques being implemented that are aimed at maintaining statistical utility without sharing data with third parties; adopting a zero-trust model that requires vigilant verification; using data protected with “noise” that makes it impossible to identify the data of individuals; and increasing transparency in AI use through active areas of research such as the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) work with Explainable AI (XAI).
