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In the twenty-first century, what are the dimensions of digital trust? Digital trust efforts have gotten a lot of attention. Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook, has stated that third-party publisher material would be de-prioritized in order to keep users focused on more "meaningful" postings from family and friends.
Google has kicked off the new year by preventing websites from appearing in Google News if their country of origin is hidden. The impending General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) of the European Union will affect any firm in the world that handles personal data for EU citizens. The rules will undoubtedly influence data protection legislation and company trust-building tactics in other countries.
Even China's shadowy behemoths have begun the year with unprecedented recognition of the need to address trust concerns: After being publicly questioned, Tencent had to officially disclaim collecting user WeChat history; Alibaba's Ant Financial apologized to customers of its mobile-payment service for automatically enrolling them in its social-credit score program.
These anecdotes show that our ability to develop digital trust is critical to our digital evolution and productive use of new technology. Is it, however, possible to quantify and compare digital trust across countries? Is there a country where ensuring trust is a higher priority, and where trust-building resources and legislation will be allocated more generously?
The Fletcher School at Tufts University and Mastercard have initiated a research endeavor to examine the level of digital trust in 42 countries in order to answer these concerns. The research "Digital Planet 2017: How Competitiveness and Trust in Digital Economies Vary Across the World" yielded the following preliminary findings.
Trust kills contradiction
We evaluated the components that impact the quality of interactions between two parties utilizing a digital medium while developing a definition of digital trust: users, who are on the "giving" side of trust, and corporations that construct platforms. These parties are referred to as givers of trust (e.g., individuals who use a ride-sharing app to summon a car, read news on social media, or pay for an online transaction) and guarantors of trust (e.g., the ride-sharing firm, social media platform, and digital payments technology).
Additionally, those offering broad trust-building measures (such as cybersecurity businesses), laws and regulations (such as the upcoming GDPR), or technical companies (such as Akamai) that make the online experience easy and convenient are on the side of the guarantors.
In a transaction between givers and guarantors, trust minimizes numerous sorts of friction. There are a variety of reasons for this friction: some are infrastructure-related, such as inadequate design and functioning; others are systemic, such as regulatory or legal requirements, or identity and data security procedures; and still, others are due to ambiguity between transaction participants. This corresponds to a variety of trust metrics.
Trust Can Be Measured in Different Countries
We wanted to calibrate trust across the board so that we could quantify it and make worldwide comparisons. Behavior, Attitudes, Environment, and Experience were the four primary characteristics we looked at. The first two are linked with givers, whereas the latter two are the outcome of guarantors' activities.
1. User behavior: How do users react to friction in their digital environments and experiences?
Because every digital engagement entails some difficulty (for example, entering a security code or waiting for a website to load on your mobile device), one could argue that just completing a transaction demonstrates a degree of digital trust.
To ensure comparability, we combined anonymized data and observations on how tolerant users are to a given level of friction and whether they persist in completing a digital transaction from several data partners, such as Akamai Technologies, Blue Triangle Technologies, and Mastercard, aggregated at a country level. In terms of tolerant conduct, we ranked 42 nations from most to least tolerant.
2. Attitudes: How do people feel about the current state of digital trust?
Surveying people with questions like How do you feel about the digital environment? is a common approach to evaluate trust. Do you find value in your interactions and do you trust them? Do you have faith in the CEOs of IT companies? Do you trust governments to protect your personal information or tech corporations to utilize it responsibly?
Do you have faith in corporations and organizations to preserve and appreciate your data? We compiled results from a range of studies, including the World Values Survey, CIGI-Ipsos, and Edelman's Trust Barometer. What are the "guarantor" processes for establishing trust in the digital economy, and how reliable are they?
3. What is the digital trust environment like for users?
We looked at three key characteristics that contribute to trust: privacy, security, and accountability. From large intrusions of sensitive information to increased government and corporate surveillance of users' digital activities, identities, and whereabouts, users' privacy is one of their top concerns. The second difficulty for trust guarantors is online security.
Cyber-attacks and the usage of ransomware have continued to rise as criminal actors have more resources and a wider range of tools at their disposal. Data on attack events might be used as a proxy for user risks. The third major issue is accountability since as the danger of events rises, consumers will want recourse alternatives such as legislative frameworks that hold firms and institutions accountable or identity management systems.
4. Digital User Experience: What is the digital trust environment like for users?
Enhancing digital privacy, security, and accountability comes with certain tradeoffs: the measures may increase friction, affecting the user experience overall. Even "good" frictions (e.g. numerous passwords, identity authentication) might have the unintended consequence of making the user less motivated to participate online if they are not managed properly. Furthermore, unfavorable frictions cause users to lose trust. The ultimate objective should be "intelligent friction," or combining a smooth experience with adequate safeguards.
We analyzed the speed and simplicity of use while transacting online, using data from numerous sources of friction, including regulatory, infrastructure, identification, and interface-related friction. We utilize aggregate to measure the quality of a country's users' digital experience.
These four criteria combine together to create a complete framework for calibrating digital trust, making cross-country comparisons and benchmarking easier. Indeed, trust is a system, and assessing trust gaps and taking steps to fix them necessitates a comprehensive approach.
While conventional methods of evaluating trust have included market surveys, decision-makers must also consider the "trust paradox," in which what individuals say differs from what they do online. The top 50 percent of nations have a median attitudinal score of 2.41, while the bottom 50 percent have a higher median attitudinal score of 2.51, implying that more tolerant countries have less trusting views on average.
Trust Deficit vs. Trust Surplus
"60 Countries' Digital Competitiveness, Indexed," previous research of global digital evolution, categorized 60 countries into Stand Out, Stall Out, Break Out, and Watch Out nations based on their stage of digital evolution (as measured by the Digital Evolution Index, DEI) and momentum (how their DEI rank changes over time).
We discover an unexpected pattern: among the 42 countries studied, the "Break Out" countries, which have a low DEI rank and high momentum, have a higher tolerance for friction and less than favorable experience and environments; the "Stall Out" countries, which are more digitally mature but have slower momentum, have a lower tolerance for friction and superior experience and environments. The former has a trust surplus, while the latter has a trust deficit; in both cases, there is a mismatch between the quality of the digital experience and surroundings and the users' degrees of friction tolerance.
As previously stated, user behavior is more meaningful as a measure of trust than what people say in attitude surveys. As a result, we chose to compare two factors in the chart below: users' behavior and their environment/experience. Because the last two are so closely related, it seemed natural to merge them.
Break Out nation users are more inclined to put up with difficulties than those in more digitally advanced countries, despite high levels of friction. Early adopters, frequently younger and passionate about new technology, are more common among online users in these nations. These consumers are aware that the technology will have issues, but are ready to work with them since they believe the analog options are worse.
Users in industrialized countries, on the other hand, who have learned to anticipate fast speeds, convenience, and dependability, have shown a far lower tolerance for friction. The irony is that some countries have less friction than others because of their superior settings and experiences.
As a result, we predict "Stall Out" countries to need proportionally higher investments in trust-building. Users' trust in technology suppliers must be earned and maintained. The digital environments' privacy, security, and accountability components must perform more effectively, with less complexity, and feel more easy and quick. This translates to speedier connections, less time-consuming user verification, simpler and easier payment processing, stricter privacy standards, and more trustworthy assurances of data privacy and security.
Building trust is not just important for our digital future, but it is also difficult – and it requires money and effort to do it. In order to effectively create trust in a global digital economy, you must make a strategic decision about where to participate. You can't invest the same amount in every market. Our framework provides a method for determining priorities and ensuring profitable growth.
Some countries will have more trustworthy digital environments, investments, and regulations than others from the perspective of users. This image is not static from the perspective of a tech corporation; as consumers' relationships with the digital economy expand, they will require greater trust assurances. Users' expectations and interests, like everything else in our digital growth, will change swiftly.
Public opinion and regulatory pressure will also play a role. It will be up to all digital businesses to stay ahead of the curve and innovate in this new competitive landscape: gaining digital trust.
In the end, a guarantor's behavior is what counts; a lesser tolerance for friction will result in a guarantor losing business. To assess how well their digital users trust them, we propose that decision-makers depend on user behavior rather than traditional attitudinal surveys. The beauty of digital settings is the abundance of such behavioral data.
Reference: https://hbr.org/2018/02/the-4-dimensions-of-digital-trust-charted-across-42-countries
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