TRUSTe not Trustworthy?

By Jimmy Daniels
Contributing Writer, RealTechNews

In a recent post from Ben Edelman, he details how the TRUSTe seal could be helping bad actors infect users pc’s, because they trust these seals mean that the site is trustworthy, du huh. So Ben took an empirical look at TRUSTe and compared their sites with the findings of SiteAdvisor, and found that TRUSTe sites are more than twice as likely to be untrustworthy.

When a stranger promises “you can trust me,” most people know to be extra vigilant. What conclusion should users draw when a web site touts a seal proclaiming its trustworthiness? Some sites that are widely regarded as extremely trustworthy present such seals. But those same seals feature prominently on sites that seek to scam users — whether through spyware infections, spam, or other unsavory practices.

It’s no great surprise that bad actors seek to free-ride on sites users rightly trust. Suppose users have seen a seal on dozens of sites that turn out to be legitimate. Dubious sites can present that same seal to encourage more users to buy, register, or download.

What do I find? In short, nothing good. I examine a sampling of 500,000+ top web sites, as reported by a major ISP. Of the sites certified by TRUSTe, 5.4% are untrustworthy according to SiteAdvisor’s data, compared with just 2.5% untrustworthy sites in the rest of the ISP’s list. So TRUSTe-certified sites are more than twice as likely to be untrustworthy. This result also holds in a regression framework controlling for site popularity (traffic rank) and even a basic notion of site type. Source: Ben Edelman

We Say: Wayne Porter posted about it on Revenews with an interview of Ben, and one of the people from TRUSTe stopped by to comment, and he has asked them for an interview. No response as of yet, but I’m hoping they take them up on it, I think with a little education TRUSTe could become a seal that we can all trust, and not just a way to legitimize bad websites.