Researcher says TRUSTe-certified sites more likely to be deceptive
Sep 29th, 2006 Posted in technology | no comment »
ARS Technica: Harvard economics researcher Ben Edelman conducted a study (PDF) to determine if sites certified by TRUSTe, a nonprofit organization that analyzes privacy policies, really respect user privacy. Using MacAfee’s SiteAdvisor tool to compare almost 1,000 TRUSTe certified sites with over 500,000 non-certified web sites, Edelman discovered that “TRUSTe-certified sites are more than twice as likely to be untrustworthy as uncertified sites.”
According to Edelman, the problem is that private certification organizations are reluctant to lose potential certification renewal revenue by revoking the certification of a client. TRUSTe claims that it “systematically monitors the practices of seal program participants to ensure that ongoing compliance with posted privacy statements” and that it provides a Watchdog Consumer Dispute Resolution service so that individual users can post complaints about sites that violate privacy policies. According to Edelman, despite “the 3,416 complaints [about certified sites] received since January 2003, TRUSTe concluded that not a single one required any change to any member’s operations, privacy statement, or privacy practices, nor did any complaint require any revocation or on-site audit.” Edelman also points out that “only two certifications [have been] revoked in TRUSTe’s ten-year history.”
