"The Problem Is, Trust Is Invisible. It's Something We Can't Check On"

Security and data-mining expert Kreshnik Musaraj of Thales spoke about the importance of trust in mobility services. He told a packed hall about the use case of mobility services in France, and the benefits it brought to French society.

When we speak about trust, there are lots of challenges ahead of us. We expect to have a much more active user in the future, not a passive user. A user who makes use of his own data.

Mobility data can be used in public sector transportation, for instance, to monitor and precisely plan the amount of resources required for travel implementation. This data will serve as the basis for a growing number of services based on mobility and individual intentions.

You can imagine this scaling up – for the Chinese New Year, for instance, they have something like 400 million people travelling all over one weekend. We can use a shared mobility data platform to optimise travel for individual users.

What we don't think about is that the data we provide every day can be very valuable. We can actually use our own data to ensure that our travel and so on is easier. It allows us to have a system of additional services centred around our mobility.

When we're out with our family and friends, we already check on our smartphones to see what the best restaurants around us are. There are these buzzwords being passed around today: big data, analytics and so on.

And trust comes into this. The problem is, trust is invisible. It's something that we can't check on.  Trust is what people feel. In France, we have these cards that you have to use for the transportation system, like Oyster cards in London. We don't trust them at all. If I use it wrong, I get fined. But I have to use it. That's not trust – that's me being forced to use it.

What about Google? I click on the box that says "Google can do whatever they like with your data", and that's it. That's not trust.

So what we imagine is that we give people a card, and say "if you use this, you get something in return".

One definition of trust is "I give away something in return for something else," and I'm assured of getting it.

The message isn't that trust needs to be bought. It can, but that's not really trust – that's a contract. It needs to be earned.

We need to do a good job, and make sure that people know that their data won't get lost, that their data won't get sold to someone. That's trust. And we shouldn't forget that if we lose trust, we lose not just one customer, but whole communities of customers. Lots of big companies have learned that the hard way.

The Trust in the Digital World conference runs from 7-8 April, and ITProPortal will be covering the ins and outs of what's being discussed here in the Austrian Chamber of Commerce.