First there was a press release declaring eBay, Verizon, and the U.S. Postal Service to be the winners of the 2009 Most Trusted Companies for Privacy Award. The survey was commissioned by Ponemon Institute and TRUSTe.
Then there was a commentary by Karl Bode on DSLreports, who points out Verizon’s history of privacy concerns, and concludes:
The awards seem more about grading a company’s ability to massage this (lack of) public perception, rather than actually grading a company’s treatment of personal data, in which case Verizon certainly does deserve an award. eBay, like Verizon, was recently at the center of a controversy involving Skype filtering keywords and logging conversations in China. That didn’t stop eBay from grabbing the top spot in the TrustE and Ponemon rankings. Facebook, home of one of the biggest privacy controversies in recent memory, ranked number 10.
Clearly, somebody needs to rank the online privacy ranking organizations.
What do you think? If we took a survey of readers of PogoWasRight.org or readers who were really privacy conscious, how different would the results of the survey look? Who would top the list for most trusted among people who might be more privacy-savvy?