The Future of Trust

Exploiting What Makes Us Human

Scams are a deeply human threat. They exploit trust, convincing people to believe the wrong thing or to question the right one. As scams grow more personal and emotionally manipulative, we’re choosing to dig deeper into what makes people vulnerable and how we can better understand them.

This is the focus of F‑Secure’s research function, Illuminate. As the rules of engagement change, so must our understanding of how digital threats exploit our human tendencies. That’s why we’re applying social science: to explore how human behavior shapes risk and test new approaches to helping people stay safe online.

A Glimpse into the Future of Trust

To anticipate what lies ahead, we recently conducted a foresight study exploring how trust will evolve over the next three to five years—identifying key global shifts that are reshaping the consumer threat landscape:

• Deteriorating information environment. As misinformation and AI‑generated content spread, it’s becoming harder to tell what’s real online.

• Economic instability. Growing financial anxiety leaves people more desperate, uncertain, and emotionally vulnerable, making them easier targets for scams.

• Unreliable internet infrastructure. We’re moving toward a future marked by outages, glitches, and unpredictable failures. This isn’t just about evolving threats, it’s about a changing internet.

How People Are Learning to Cope Online

After more than two decades online, many of us have developed coping mechanisms to navigate digital spaces. But as the threat landscape evolves, those strategies are starting to break down. Even confident, tech-savvy users are now being scammed in growing numbers—proof that past experience is no longer enough to stay safe.

To better understand this shift, we identified several emerging patterns of behavioral adaptation. Shaped by risk appetite, digital confidence, culture, values, and behaviors, they reveal how people are trying to regain control in an environment that feels increasingly unpredictable. The following examples represent just a few of the broader set of patterns.

• Scam Taxpayer: A busy individual who accepts minor fraud losses as just another cost of modern digital life.

• Exhausted Influencer: A content creator who is shrinking their online presence after repeated negative experiences.

• Confident Outrunner: Someone who thinks they’re too smart to be targeted by scammers.

Together, these patterns help us navigate the future digital behavior landscape, showing not just what people do online, but how they feel, cope, and adapt. This perspective helps identify gaps between threat exposure and user response that traditional models overlook and enables the design of protection that accounts for human emotion, not just digital function.

Designing Protection That Builds Trust

Building on this work, we’re developing future consumer archetypes shaped by one of the most important forces in online behavior: trust dynamics.

Take two examples: Gretchen and Vivienne. Each reflects a distinct mix of digital confidence, social behavior, motivation, and risk exposure. These patterns reveal where protection is most needed—and what form it should take.

Rethinking Consumer Segmentation

The internet is changing. Traditional segmentation based on age, location, or device no longer captures the full picture. To truly understand our users, we need to look at how they trust, how they feel, and how they live.

This gives us something powerful: a framework to design protection that’s personalized, not one-size-fits-all. It’s how we stay ahead of tomorrow’s threats and fight back against the scam pandemic.