Fergie's Tech Blog

Researcher Takes TRUSTe to Task

Robert Lemos writes on SecurityFocus:

A controversial survey of more than a half million Web sites released on Monday found that sites are twice as likely to be rated as bad actors if they have been certified by the TRUSTe non-profit industry group.

The research--conducted by Benjamin Edelman, an economics graduate student at Harvard University and spyware expert--used McAfee's SiteAdvisor Internet rating service to grade the top 515,309 Web sites. The researcher found that while 13,148 of those Web sites, or 2.5 percent, were deemed untrustworthy, the proportion of untrustworthy sites doubled to 5.4 percent, if only the 874 TRUSTe-certified sites were considered.

"It's no great surprise that bad actors seek to free-ride on sites users rightly trust," Edelman said in a statement on his Web site. "But certification issuers don't have to let this happen. They could develop and enforce tough rules, so that every site showing a seal is a site users aren't likely to regret visiting. Unfortunately, certification don't always live up to this ideal."

posted by Fergie @ 9/26/2006 04:30:00 PM