[ Changed 4th March 1997 ]
Unless, as citizens and consumers, we believe that we can trust the government and business organisations that keep personal information about us, to treat that information confidentially and to use it only in ways that we consider to be in our interest, the ``information society'' will be a conflict-ridden, expensive and litigious affair.
In this presentation, I want to explore how we can understand better what determines trust in general. I then go on to look more specifically at how trust in connection with privacy, and I will conclude by setting out some strategies for policy in the fields of data protection, trusted third parties and independence of subject access to buttress trust and trustworthiness in the digital age.