Using cellphone GPS tracking, family helps police catch man who robbed them

An article in today’s Washington Post tells the story of a Maryland couple who, after their home was burglarized, activated a GPS tracking service available from Sprint Nextel (their wireless carrier) and gave assistance to local…

VA over-disclosure of EHR data highlights difficulty in managing fine-grained consent

In its Monthly Report to Congress On Data Incidents for the month of September (the exact time period noted on the report is August 30 – October 3, 2010), the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) describes…

Trust enables, but is not required for, both cooperation and collaboration

There is wide variation on the most effective means to foster or achieve cooperation between organizations, but trust is one of several mechanisms often suggested that can have an enabling effect on cooperation, alone or in…

Decisions to trust others are both personal and subjective

One of the more challenging aspects of addressing organizational trust (whether between individuals and organizations or between two or more organizations) is the inherent subjectivity involved in determining the trustworthiness of organizations and making decisions to…

When does technical competence trump historical performance

The joint announcement last week by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Department of Defense (DoD) to formalize a cooperative relationship between the two agencies to provide coordinated cybersecurity operations to protect government computing…

Illustrating different applications of the concept of trust

While the core topic of this blog is managing trust, one recurring theme that serves as a sort of preliminary consideration to trust management is making sense of trust as a fundamental concept and, especially, understanding…

Rewarding processing speed at the expense of accuracy is a failure of risk managment

In the wake of the decision by many leading financial institutions to suspend mortgage foreclosure proceedings due to the discovery of pervasive deficiencies in the way those processes were being carried out, the practices of the…