You surf the Web with multiple identities. Every day, your e-mails share bandwidth with 160 billion others. And each online purchase you make contributes to more than $100 billion of e-commerce revenue annually.

Unfortunately, we pay a price for the convenience of living online. Since January 2005, there have been more than 150 million identity breaches. Your credit card number — along with PIN — is worth nearly $500. And 45 to 98 percent of all Internet messages are spam.

Not too long ago, it would have been unthinkable to do business with a faceless stranger; today, however, millions of business transactions are conducted online with barely a second thought. How did we go from depending upon trust cues such as a steady gaze and firm handshake to blithely sharing personal information with the click of a mouse?

The answer, according to a new report from CSC’s Leading Edge Forum, is Digital Trust.