Study: eBay, Yahoo among most trusted companies

eBay is the most trusted company in terms of privacy, and Yahoo and Facebook are among the Top 10, according to a new report released on Wednesday.

Following eBay is Verizon, the U.S. Postal Service, WebMD, IBM, Procter & Gamble, Nationwide and Intuit, with Yahoo and Facebook in the ninth and tenth spots, the study from the Ponemon Institute and Truste says.

Here are the list of the most trusted companies in privacy, according to a study by the Ponemon Institute and Truste.

(Credit: Ponemon Institute/Truste)

It was Facebook's debut on the list, as well as the first time a telecommunications company and a government operation cracked the top three.

While the list ranks the most trusted companies based on consumer brand perception it doesn't necessarily translate to the list of the most trustworthy companies, Kevin Bankston, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told CNET News.

"They really ought to do one ranking for the poll and a separate one for the actual privacy evaluation," Bankston wrote on Facebook. "Blending them together makes these rankings rather useless."

Basically, privacy practices were analyzed and ranked only for a list of 23 companies that were highly rated in a survey of more than 6,000 U.S. consumers earlier this year, according to Truste spokeswoman Carolyn Hodge. The Top 20 from that survey were analyzed and that included 23 companies because of several ties, she said.

So, the latest study most accurately reflects which companies were deemed to have the best privacy practices among a list of companies that consumers perceive as being trustworthy.

"It absolutely is based on consumers' perception of specific brands. That's what we're trying to get at," Hodge said. "The idea behind this research is to promote consumer education about privacy and to promote adoption of best practices by companies...We understand consumers are probably going to name companies they trust and there may not be a clear correlation with privacy."

Regardless, Hodge and Larry Ponemon, founder of the institute that bears his name, said the companies on the list deserved recognition.

"None of these companies is doing badly at privacy," said Hodge. "We're talking about the best companies out there."

"Clearly there can be variance between perception and reality," Ponemon said. But, he noted, Verizon recently adopted a new more consumer-friendly privacy policy, eBay does a good job on data security and Facebook has made great improvements lately on user privacy.

"I'm not a big fan, but what Facebook is is an experiment...they've had issues and come a long way on privacy," he said.

In assessing the level of trustworthiness of the popular brands, Truste staff looked at 40 criteria, Hodges said. The criteria included things like whether a company: has a clear, readability and easy to find privacy statement; provides adequate access to account information; uses cookies and discloses that to users; shares data with other companies and affiliates; has a data retention policy; has a chief privacy officer; whether they disclose a user's e-mail during password reset; and whether they use Web beacons.

In addition, representatives from the Ponemon Institute called companies without identifying themselves and asked questions about privacy practices to see how well their customer service representatives respond to consumer inquiries about that.

Here is the list of the most trusted companies from December 2008.

(Credit: Truste)

[mailbox001]

Where's Apple? /s

[cbscowards]

Please don't feed the trolls.

[mooseontheloose89]

Wow... Microsoft and Google didn't make the list? Oh well, I guess I'll just have to wait for the follow-up study: Top 10 Most Despised Companies.

Just kidding...

[eltoro2827]

google being #1

[davidmcelroy_dotmac]

Isn't the headline here very misleading? The story is about which companies are trusted most on the sole issue of PRIVACY. The headline doesn't mention that key point, instead leading us to believe that the "trust" ranked by the survey is much broader. Those are two very different issues.

[milrtime]

I agree, ebay may be fine when it comes to privacy issues, but I doubt they would make the list at all if it were based on trusting ebay as a whole.

[smrterthnu]

NATIONWIDE IS ON YOUR SIDE!
I hope they're trust worthy with a slogan like that!

Apple? Apparently screwing your customers by charging exorbitant prices doesn't affect "trust worthiness".

[cbscowards]

Please don't feed the trolls.

[Renegade Knight]

Gack. eBay took down my auction for an unused copy of Vista because of a DMCA take down notice issued by MicroSoft. When I asked eBay to see a copy of the take down notice they said I would need a subpeana. I lost trust in them about then. Microsoft was worthless to work with as well since all I could talk to about the issue were low level drones who were only authorized to repeat generic statements and not actually address the issue directly.

Now that Yahoo is in bed with MicroSoft, I'm sure the MS suck factor will pull them down.

[cvaldes1831]

Please don't feed the trolls.

[groink_hi]

I sold my unused retail version of Vista without any problem. Your problem, however, was more likely brought upon yourself. For example, if it was indeed a retail version, you should have mentioned it. Or, if it was an OEM version that came shipped with the PC, you must sell either the original hard drive or motherboard along with the OEM disk. You can't just sell the Vista install disk because you blew the hard drive away and installed Linux or other OS. The disk must be sold along with the original hardware (hard disk or motherboard.) Otherwise, selling the OEM disk alone would break both Microsoft's OEM license agreement and eBay's policies. eBay's policies is clearly written and includes what I mentioned.

[The Wiethoff]

I like how the 2008 list has two number 6s, 16s, and 20s. Having ties for ambiguous ratings is just silly.

[NoVista]

Yair, misleading headline.

I had good experience on eBay and then four 'anomalies' happened -- and my response was to unsubscribe. An auto-reply confirmed but it wasn't true. If a user can't guarantee the opt-out, trust is zero.

I'd like some of these study bozos to actually have personal experience in what they profess to 'know'.