What do we Trust on the Internet, asks eSociety Event

'There are all kinds of reasons to hope that people will distrust as well as trust online,' said Sonia Livingstone of the London School of Economics, after her fellow panellists at the eSociety conference on had spent rather a long time on discussing what builds trust. 'Two thirds of children and young people say they've had no guidance on how to decide whether to trust what they find online.' Livingstone has extensively researched children's behaviour online and advises the UK Government on child safety.

"Why should we trust what we read online?" was a panel chaired by Fru Hazlitt, managing director of Yahoo!, co-sponsor of the conference, where Livingstone was joined by speakers: Rupert Gatti, University of Cambridge; Charlie Dobres, Chairman of i-level; and Richard Eyre, Chairman of the Interactive Advertising Bureau.

Eyre asked 'whose truth would you like? The few or the many?' He juxtaposed the mass media monopolies of the past with the rise of the swarm: bloggers, 'the cornucopia of smaller conversations that we can also listen to', communities of interest. He pointed out that there is a history of media regulation working to keep trustworthiness, something that is also being challenged by the development of the Internet. We are used to a duty of truth from what we read, but the online world has – for better or worse – proved too elusive for this kind of regulation.

Dobres and Gatti introduced economics into the discussion. Dobres saw trust in terms of people's willingness to spend money online. It wasn't even a question of whether people trusted the Internet, it was the individual brands and their credibility that was key. And Gatti brought with him research into price comparisons online: twice as many people compare product price online as they do when buying in shops. However, this was only one in eight people. He maintained that as shoppers weighed up perceived benefits with perceived risk, they still looked to other factors in choosing whether and what to buy: will they get what they ordered, will it be how it was described, how easy is it to get a refund, will it be delivered as promised and what will they do with the information sent to them in order to make the transaction.

An argument ensued between the two of them about reputation systems. 'A reputation system works while people believe that it is hard to manipulate,' said Gatti, maintaining that many are easy to influence. He then explained exactly how to abuse the one used by eBay, one of Dobres' clients.

The occasion was also the launch of the second phase of the eSociety research umbrella, supported by the UK's Economic and Social Research Council: the largest ever programme devoted to exploring the impact of the Internet. More details of the new projects starting will run for the rest of this week.

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