Trust is related to absence in time and in space. There would be no need to trust anyone whose activities were continually visible and whose thought processes were transparent, or to trust any system whose workings were wholly known and understood. It has been said that trust is “a device for coping with the freedom of others,”30but the prime condition of requirements for trust is not lack of power but lack of full information.

QUESTION: If trust is required only where information is incomplete, does better surveillance or transparency erode trust rather than build it? This connects to modern debates about institutional transparency.

Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Moderni…, loc. 84