Trust Has a Half-Life

Left unattended, things decay over time, and I would argue this includes trust.  While everyone may already know this, nonetheless this concept just hit me as an epiphany while I was noodling at a recent national security-related think tank.  It suddenly struck me as obvious – that personal information one entrusts to a friend in confidence has a risk of future unanticipated disclosure that increases in relation to the elapsed time over which one has grown apart from this person.

I’ll bet this is true of for everyone.  Have you ever told someone something very personal, someone who you have not spoken to in some great time?  Would you consider this “secret” equally safe as when you first decided to share this confidential tidbit?  Well if it is family, a counselor, someone governed by some legal mechanism, etc. fine – but what about everyone else?  What about long gone co-workers, old roommates or that x-girlfriend?

So, I started thinking about trust in terms of a half-life, in the same way Carbon-14 has a half life.

The government re-investigates certain employees with Top Secret clearances every five years, while other government employees are subjected to polygraph testing every single year.  Your creditors/lenders typically check your credit report every few months to determine if your trustworthiness (responsibility for debt) has changed.  And, many employers require that their employees change their password every 90 days to account for the risk that you may have compromised the security of this secret – all examples that trust decays and evidence that trust must have some half-life.

Different kinds of relationships will have different trust decay cycles.  Immediate family for example, would typically have a longer half-life than a former classmate who has since gone their own way.

Therefore, I contend that virtually all confidential information would be subject to this trust half-life … as over time and with near certainty it will be disclosed to a broader audience than originally intended, of which some contributing factors would include the number of holders of such information and the degree the holder(s) are left unattended.

What does this mean? And what do we do about it?  Well to be quite honest, I am not sure.  Maybe the government’s half-life for big secrets is so short that its five year background re-investigation (i.e., a large “unattended” window) does not provide sufficient trust – which may in turn contributes to the fact that organizations are often challenged to information share and collaborate even amongst themselves.  And if this was true, then perpetual employee vetting (e.g., Perpetual Analytics deployed for continuous backgrounds checks) might change the slope of the half-life curve, which in turn might lead to better teaming and real process improvements.

I welcome your comments, as I would be very curious to hear what, if anything at all, you might make of this.

Comments

[Bill Brabant]

Very insightful Jeff. For me it has been family doing the betraying. What may be highly important for us, the individual, becomes heresay for whoever we trust. I don't think it holds the same pending circumstances for them as it would us. Yet, if they were to feel the same pain we would, they may hold a secret longer than its half-life. Bill

[JTH]

Jeff:

Read your piece yesterday and then pondered a bit.
Re-read it this AM.

What about another side of the issue, understanding that there may be many facets, maybe importance has a half life too.

Some secrets are more important than others, while some have more rapid decay than others.

Somebody tells me that they have or had relatives in the CIA isn’t important today, now that the relatives have passed away. Somebody tells me about political string pulling for a company to make a windfall is less important as time passes.
Headline news today becomes a “so what” story over time.

Another facet can be one of personal perception.
Something you think of as “insider knowledge”, once revealed may end up being common knowledge … where others reply “everybody knows That!”

[Brian Benz]

I can definitely relate to this - I used to work for a mergers & acquisitions group in a large telecom company in Canada. In that group we had to work in strict secrecy, with project and company code names – up until a certain day, when announcements were made. Knowledge that one day would have cost certain parties millions or billions, the next day was free for all.

I guess the half-life for me would be measured by what can be done with the information vs. what can be revealed. Revelation may sometimes be painful, but not always harmful. The holder of the secret gets to decide which is which based on their intentions. And of course there are always the unintended consequences of disclosure, especially with family ;).

[Dave Piscitello]

Hi Jeff,

I think it's time to try to marry your thoughts about trust having a half-life with progressive, voluntary disclosure of personal information through social networking, location "disclosing" applications (Twitter, Geo-spatial tagging), unifying applications like Google Voice, and (here it comes) cloud computing and storage.

I'll propose the following as a topic: we have reached a state where the decay rate of trust is accelerating and the persistence of publicly accessible personal information is growing, arguably exponentially. What is the limit of this function? Knowing your next movement and thoughts? Wow...