Can We Use Trust in Online Dating?

Abstract

Trust models have been used widely in the literature in a number of different contexts. We examine an emotive scenario where trust would be extremely useful: online dating. We explore the use of a semiring-based trust model with online dating in a social network. Introductions are facilitated by friend-of-a-friend connections in the network in a manner similar to some real world scenarios. We show how ethical and human factors, which are usually not considered, cause problems. We hope that as a result the trust community can work together to formulate new approaches to trust for emotive applications that accommodate ethical and human factors which are difficult to quantify.

Publication
Journal of Wireless Mobile Networks, Ubiquitous Computing, and Dependable Applications