Trust in what companies do with personal data is plummeting. Yesterday’s announcement that Google LLC has been secretly mining health data is just the latest in a series of revelations that have far-reaching implications for the future. But the issue goes deeper than just data.

From Facebook Inc. to Volkswagen AG, and Boeing Co. to Theranos Inc., companies across the globe are putting profit over dependability, creating a cultural crisis of faith for consumers.

“If you lose trust in one area as a company or a brand, you lose that ability to interact with people,” said Rachel Botsman (pictured), author of “Who Can You Trust? How Technology Brought Us Together and Why It Might Drive Us Apart” and trust fellow at the University of Oxford Saïd Business School.

Botsman spoke with Lisa Martin, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Coupa Inspire EMEA conference in London. They discussed the intersection of trust and technology in customer relationships (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

Trust is the currency of interactions

Trust can’t be measured, according to Botsman. While money has an agreed-upon value within society, trust is a less-defined and underestimated currency for business success.

“Think of it as something that you should really value, that is incredibly fragile in any situation in any organization,” Botsman said.

Blaming the product or a flaw in the system is common practice when companies experience failures. But this is sometimes an excuse, according to Botsman.

“It’s this belief they can keep things hidden,” Botsman said, describing the negative culture of businesses that have lost their sense of corporate responsibility. “It’s a continual pattern. They don’t really show humility.”

Recovery after a loss of consumer trust is harder than recovering from technical or quality control issues, according to Botsman. She uses Samsung’s problems with its Galaxy Note 7 and Boeing’s 737 Max disasters as examples.

“You can recover from a product crisis, [such as] with the phones, and they kind of go away,” she said. “But it’s much harder to recover from what — Boeing is a perfect example — has become a cultural crisis.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of Coupa Inspire EMEA. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the Coupa Inspire event. Neither Coupa Software Inc., the sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE