Abstract

Many things found on the internet are low-quality, false, or dangerous. Web surfers are often asked to make decisions of trust without any background information. Meta-information about what is good or trustworthy is traditionally spread by word of mouth or proactive inquiry, but the vast quantity of resources encountered online demands a faster means of distribution. This paper describes a method for using a social network of defined trust relations for individualized collection of metadata. Additionally, the applications of this method are demonstrated in a software prototype which reorders search results based on metadata, and presents trusted evaluations of web pages, downloaded files, and running processes as they are encountered. Preliminary results from test users is presented. Finally, it is argued that the chains of trust inherent in social networks should be applied at lower levels of computation, even at the level of the operating system.