Don't trust anyone online

Don't trust anyone online

Researcher says TRUSTe-certified sites more likely to be deceptive

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.'

The moral is, never trust anybody online.