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)Despite a down day for the broader markets Friday, a handful of tech stocks swam against the tide, posting modest single-digit gains.
The trading performance of Google, eBay, and Symantec on Friday.
(Credit: Yahoo Finance)Google, Symantec, and eBay were just some of the tech companies to finish the day in the black. The CNET Tech Index was down a modest 1.59 points to end the day at 1,185.55.
Google closed up 5.53 percent to $372.54 a share, which comes as little surprise considering the tech titan posted stronger-than-expected third-quarter earnings results on Thursday. And on Friday, a number of analysts released largely positive comments on the quarter, while giving a cautious outlook for the coming quarters and years on revenue growth.
eBay, meanwhile, was up 2.54 percent to $15.35 a share, a welcome change for the e-commerce giant which earlier in the week saw its shares punished after posting its third-quarter results, in which it revised its fourth-quarter projections downward.
Symantec, meanwhile, gained 4.09 percent to close at $15.28 a share. The security software giant may have gotten a lift following a report in Barron's that investors may find a safe harbor in security software stocks.
As for the broader markets, they ended a wild week in the red.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed down 127.04 points at 8,852.22--a rather modest ending to a week that saw the Dow soar 936.42 points on Monday, marking its largest single one-day gain; it then traversed back and forth, crossing the 9,000 mark several times throughout the week.
The Nasdaq closed down 6.42 points to close the session at 1,711.29, while the S&P 500 dipped 5.88 points to finish up at 940.55.
The following chart shows Friday's closing numbers:
Skype's president said that the company was largely unaware of a major security breach affecting Skype users in China.
In a blog published Thursday, Josh Silverman, Skype's president, explained he did not realize that TOM-Skype, Skype's partner in China, was logging and storing users' instant messages that were deemed offensive by the Chinese government.
He said the company knew that instant-messaging chats were monitored by the government, as all communications in China are. And he explained that Skype disclosed this to users in 2006, explaining that a text filter was being used to block certain words in chat messages. But he added that his understanding was that messages deemed unsuitable were "simply discarded and not displayed or transmitted anywhere."
"It was our understanding that it was not TOM's protocol to upload and store chat messages with certain keywords," he writes in the blog. "And we are now inquiring with TOM to find out why the protocol changed."
Earlier this week, Canadian researchers at the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto published a report in which they said that "TOM-Skype was censoring and logging text chats that contain specific, sensitive keywords and may be engaged in more targeted surveillance."
The report also said the service was logging and capturing millions of records that include personal information and contact details for any text chat and voice calls placed to TOM-Skype users, including calls from Skype users. In addition, TOM was storing this information in a way that was inadequate in protecting the privacy of TOM-Skype users, the report said.
Silverman said that once Skype became aware of the problem it contacted executives at TOM, and the security issue regarding stored personal information has been resolved. But he also noted the company's concern that TOM has been storing this information.
"We were very concerned to learn about both issues and after we urgently addressed this situation with TOM, they fixed the security breach," he said. "In addition, we are currently addressing the wider issue of the uploading and storage of certain messages with TOM."
Silverman pointed out in his blog that TOM, like all other ISPs in China, is required by the Chinese government to monitor all communication. And he said it is "common knowledge that censorship does exist in China." Keywords that triggered action included words related to Taiwanese independence, the banned religious group Falun Gong, and political opposition to the Chinese Communist Party.
But he tried to reassure Skype users that Skype's computer-to-computer voice calls are completely secure.
"(The security breach) does not affect communications where all parties are using standard Skype software," he said. "Skype-to-Skype communications are, and always have been, completely secure and private."
TOM-Skype, eBay's joint venture in China, is recording customer text chats and censoring them if they contain certain keywords related to topics the government deems objectionable, according to a report released on Wednesday (PDF) by researchers in Canada.
"TOM-Skype is censoring and logging text chat messages that contain specific, sensitive keywords and may be engaged in more targeted surveillance," the report concludes. "What is clear is that TOM-Skype is engaging in extensive surveillance with seemingly little regard for the security and privacy of Skype users. This is in direct contradiction of Skype's public statements regarding their policies in China."
The keywords that trigger action include words related to Taiwanese independence, the banned religious group Falun Gong, and political opposition to the Chinese Communist Party, says the report from the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto.
The service also routinely logs and captures millions of records that include personal information and contact details for any text chat and voice calls placed to TOM-Skype users, including calls from Skype users, the researchers found.
Not only is the data collection suspect, but there are inadequate safeguards to protect the privacy of the TOM-Skype users, according to the report. The records and information needed to decrypt the log files are kept on servers that are accessible by the public.
"This is the worst nightmares of the conspiracy theorists around surveillance coming true," Ronald J. Deibert, an associate professor of political science at the University of Toronto, told The New York Times. "It's X-Files without the aliens."
Representatives from eBay did not immediately respond to e-mails seeking comment on the report.
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