2010 MRes projects
- A feasibility study of the use of ground penetrating radar and metal oxide semiconductor sensors on a mobile platform for security applications
- The use of forensic evidence in the prosecution of terrorism cases in Britain
- Scintillation materials for the detection of special nuclear materials (SNMs)
- Looking beyond borders: Identification, information and the diffusion of conflicts.
- How hard can it be?: A study investigating user trust decisions in e-commerce
- Non-contact object localisation for automated 'on-belt- tomosynthesis
- Immmunising the Internet
- Investigating forward scatter radar for maritime target detection using statistical and comparative study
- The spatial distribution of post-blast RDX residue: Forensic implications
- Factors influencing intelligence analysts performance in using Bayesian and automated analysis of competing hypotheses
- Secure digital archive search using a probably approximately correct architecture
- Constraints and prospects of the application of scientific rigour to conflict early warning in Africa
- Prediction of crime patterns emerging from simulated search trajectories of individual offenders
- Download warnings: A rational rejection of security advice?
- The effectiveness of vehicle security devices to prevent car crime in Chile
- Inferring user behaviour despite wireless network encryption
- A feasibility study of the use of ground penetrating radar and metal oxide semiconductor sensors on a mobile platform for security applications
 |
 |
 |
 |
How hard can it be?: A study investigating user trust decisions in e-commerce
22 February 2012
Consumers face a significant number of challenges when shopping online. One of those is to protect their personal and financial details from scammers, who create fake online shopping sites with tempting offers, resulting to users to disclosing that information to them. Trust plays a significant role in online commerce, as misplacement of it can result to users becoming scam victims.
This study used exploratory research methods (eye-tracking and open interviews) and identified a set of factors that users use to assess the trustworthiness of an online retailer in a first time interaction: Perceived professionalism, ability of the trustee to fulfil, links to charity, company information, relation to other known entities, presence of regulatory authorities. The results indicate that the heuristics people use to assess trustworthiness are widely varying and are often created based on misconceptions users form, drawing from past online shopping experiences. The study also tested methodological issues on the effects of incentives in laboratory experiments, revealing a tendency of users to assign different grades and adopt riskier strategies when incentives were introduced in the experimental setup.
A second hypothesis tested revealed the ineffectiveness of trust seals as a trust signalling mechanism, based on the practices followed in their use to date. 53% of the participants did not notice those and, even those who did, did not seem to correctly interpret their meaning, as post-experiment interviews revealed.
This dissertation discusses the findings related to past literature on trust in the real world and, based on the identified misconceptions, presents directions towards implementing security awareness, education and training approaches to improve on user’s ability to identify scam websites. It also proposes technical solutions that can improve on communicating to the users the risks involved in their decisions.
