I totally trust Facebook. To fuck me over at every possible opportunity, even if they’ve pinky promised “we’d never do that!”. Because they have a track record of doing exactly that.
‘Trust’ is defined as wilful forbearance toward those agencies that we can conceive of as being sources of harm to us.
If you “trust Facebook to fuck [you] over” then you’re not trusting Facebook. You’re expecting Facebook to fuck you over and minimising your exposure to that process.
If you ask a computing security (or indeed any security) professional, "trust" has a different definition. If A trusts B, then B has the capability of doing something bad to A. This is regardless of whether A has granted B that capability. So, when you drive down the road, you trust the oncoming car not to swerve into your path and crash into you. This is just another way of saying that the oncoming car has the capability to swerve into your path and crash into you. There's no wilful forbearance involved.
I disagree insofar as the scenarios you describe (implicit trust in computer security, trust that another driver won’t swerve into your vehicle’s path) are perfectly good examples of the overall definition I posited above.
Indeed, if one didn’t have forbearance of (say) a software vendor or perhaps a dependency then one would be entirely free to not use that vendor’s product or that particular package. Similarly, if you don’t swerve right to prudentially make space for an approaching vehicle to serve into your path then you’re showing them forbearance and trusting them (or swerve left, depending on one’s location on the Earth what side of the road is legally mandate).
So, yep: those are perfect examples of Trust as embodied in the definition I presented above. And of course it lies at the root of initiatives such as Trusted Computing Initiative & cetera.
