Full text of this MIT Press book is available online (in draft form).

Trust is the critical variable in Internet Commerce. Trust requirements differentiate Internet from other forms of commerce. Trust has three primary components: reliability, security, and privacy.

There is trust in routing, trust in encryption, and trust in applications. The layers of trust, the areas of risk, the power of cryptography, and the limits to security are all explained for the general audience in this text.

When a business obtains customer data, the customer trusts that the data are used to improve service for her, and not used in a manner that harms her. The business is not necessarily violating privacy but is certainly requiring some extension of trust from the customer. This book carefully examines that trust relationship and examines the types of data that are most immediately useful but the least used.

This book contains detailed explanations of fault tolerance and the components of reliability. Most transactions today are not fault tolerant. If a transaction is not reliable (in the sense of being fault tolerant) someone is at risk when the transaction fails. It is therefore important to be able to read a transaction-based Internet commerce standard and understand from that the risks involved in using the standard.