Ranking online services by the core areas of trustworthiness

Citizens’ trust in online services remains very low as they come across certain difficulties in appraising their trustworthiness. Existing trustworthiness-related labels and seals struggle to be acknowledged by users. However, they have overshadowed by concerns related to the quality of service, without paying much attention to other core areas of trustworthiness derived from ethics, law, and sociology. In addition, usability issues have limited their adoption so that users can make an informed decision about a particular online service based on their specific needs. To fill these gaps, this paper builds on earlier work that defines a set of criteria for trustworthiness that emerged from an interdisciplinary discussion involving ethical, sociocultural, legal, business, and technological perspectives, and proposes a framework for ranking online services according to their quantitative level of trustworthiness and the user preferences. By using an excerpt from the criteria, we demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed framework