An idea for software giants to build trust

“Improve Google desktop”. “Improve Microsoft windows”. Sending crash reports and performance data may improve the experience down the road by providing engineers this information, but this information is useful to the user as well. My question to the software giants is: why not share it and gain some free trust at the same time?

Sending packets of data of which the contents cannot be verified does not engender trust. Amongst technologists that I know, many would simply say don’t waste the computing resources to send that information; it is just another task bogging down the machine. The wry smile often follows out with an added “who trusts them anyway?”

I for one would like to see would like to see what is sent from my home or office. It is not because I am paranoid, which I may be, but because I spend a considerable number of dollars on computing devices and would like to have the same performance information already being collected.

Of course, trust in this area may not be perceived as an issue, but the NYTimes and WSJ have both written recently about trust deteriorating as social networking builds and personal information is harvested and sold. Performance data may be unlikely to have the same value as an email address matched to a name, however it could be used a technology wealth metric. Marketers would be happy to buy such a verifiable aspect of personal profiling. After all, it came from known machine with very specific ID characteristics.