‘Must Fix Trust’: Privacy-enhancing technologies as reductive tools
other
Technology is frequently associated with trust: it ought to provide “means and mechanisms that deliver predefined outputs reliably and predictably” (Chew et al. 2023). This mechanic, solutionist view on trust as fix is especially visible in cases where “trust is chosen as a label” to denote risk, confidence, or reliability (Kroeger 2022; Laux et al. 2024). The various examples effectively reduce trust to a measurable outcome: positioning (most frequently, privacy-enhancing) technology as a fix, a “social cure-all” (Johnston 2018) that creeps into systems (Koops 2021). Arguably, this is textbook solutionism (Mann et al. 2022).
TNO Identifier
1017975
Publisher
TNO
Source title
Amsterdam Trust Summit 2025, August 28-29, 2025, Amsterdam, Netherlands