Measuring Trust in Wi-Fi Hotspots

Pervasive systems provide services that are situated within specific contexts. An everyday example of this is Wi-Fi hotspots. Factors such as branding and presentation are known to affect whether users are prepared to invest trust in services, but little is known about trust in situated services. This paper describes an experiment to measure de facto trust in Wi-Fi hotspots in public places, as opposed to examining trust behaviour in a simulated lab setting. The authors investigated two hypotheses about the effect of location specific images in the hotspot's pages on trust behaviours, compared to images of non-specific locations. The authors found a significant result which confirms that decisions to access an unfamiliar Wi-Fi hotspot can be affected by location relevant images.