Trustworthy humans and machines: Vulnerable trustors and the need for trustee competence, integrity, and benevolence in digital systems

In this chapter we argue that transparency is worthless in guaranteeing the trustworthiness of the trustees (those in charge of designing and managing digital systems) when trustors are vulnerable and depend on those same technologies and systems. Specifically here we focus on the trustworthiness of security engineers, those responsible for the dependability of systems and devices. We propose abandoning the rationalistic instrumental paradigm of trust to embrace a vision of trust as care in order to ensure the trustworthiness—that is, the competence, integrity, and benevolence—of operators of digitally mediated sociotechnical systems.This work was partially funded by the “TRESCA—Trustworthy, Reliable, and Engaging Scientific Communication Approaches” project, funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Program under grant agreement no. 872855, and by the project “CYNAMON— Cybersecurity, Network Analysis, and Monitoring for the Next Generation Internet,” sponsored by “Programas de Actividades de I+D entre grupos de investigación de la Comunidad de Madrid en tecnologías 2018” (P2018/TCS4566), cofinanced with FSE and FEDER EU funds.Peer reviewe