Measuring Trust in Wi-Fi Hotspots

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Summary
In Measuring Trust in Wi-Fi Hotspots, the researchers wanted to study the effects of appearance of electronic communication websites on trust of the website or service. For their experiment, they setup at a couple of different locations (restaurants that provided food, drinks, and free Wi-Fi internet) and equipped each location with a "fake" Wi-Fi hotspot that patrons of the restaurant could connect to. When a user tried to connect to their hotspot, the homepage was shown with an image. They were asked to enter their mobile phone number (even though the service was free), and then were given a keycode to get access to the internet. After entering the keycode correctly, they were sent to a webpage with a debriefing message to explain what this experiment was about, and also assure them that their phone number would not be stolen. The main quality measure in this experiment was: Does a location-specific image on the homepage of a wireless internet hotspot affect the likeliness that a person will accept the hotspot as being secure and safe? The participants were divided into two sections:

• Those that connected to the website and saw an image of the restaurant that they were at or a picture of the city they were in.
• Those that connected to the website and saw a random image that did not correlate with the location they were in.

The researchers found that people were much more likely to give out their mobile phone number to a website that had the picture of the location they were in, even if it was an unfamiliar website that was asking for information (the phone number) that didn't seem necessarily, showing us interesting data about how trusting internet users are and how easy it is to fake, or "phish," a website or email from a fake provider.

Discussion
This seemed a little scary because I have traveled to different areas and connected to Wi-Fi networks that I had no proof were safe. If these researchers could easily add their own hotspot, then a hacker that wants to steal all of my information can do the same. This paper has definitely led me to reconsider how easily I trust sources on the internet or emails that are sent to me, and especially reconsider how easily I trust wireless access points.