Bridge the Gap: Measuring and Analyzing Technical Data for Social Trust between Smartphones

TL;DR

This paper investigates how technical data from mobile devices, like call and message logs, can be used to measure and analyze social trust, aiming to establish reliable trust metrics for ad-hoc mobile communication.

Contribution

It introduces a method to derive social trust from measurable technical data and validates this approach through a large-scale user survey.

Findings

Social communication metrics correlate with social trust.

A priori trust values can be reliably estimated from interaction logs.

Large-scale data supports the feasibility of trust measurement from technical data.

Abstract

Mobiles are nowadays the most relevant communication devices in terms of quantity and flexibility. Like in most MANETs ad-hoc communication between two mobile phones requires mutual trust between the devices. A new way of establishing this trust conducts social trust from technically measurable data (e.g., interaction logs). To explore the relation between social and technical trust, we conduct a large-scale survey with more than 217 Android users and analyze their anonymized call and message logs. We show that a reliable a priori trust value for a mobile system can be derived from common social communication metrics.