People trust machines more than humans for sharing data

People who trusted machines were significantly more likely to hand over their credit card numbers to a computerised travel agent than a human travel agent, said S. Shyam Sundar, Co-director of the Media Effects Research Laboratory and affiliate of Penn State's Institute for CyberScience. "A bias that that machines are more trustworthy and secure than people -- or the machine heuristic -- may be behind the effect," Sundar added. The faith in machines may be triggered because people believe that machines do not gossip, or have unlawful designs on their private information. However, said Sundar, while machines might not have ulterior motives for their information, the people developing and running those computers could prey on this gullibility to extract personal information from unsuspecting users, for example, through phishing scams.