Web site trust certifications untrustworthy?
Web sites who sell things often carry various third-party certifications, most often from Verisign, Better Business Bureau and Truste. These programs are supposed to instill confidence in customers who are a little wary about Internet shopping by reassuring them the SSL certificate is valid or the site doesn’t peddle spyware or sell your personal information to spammers.
There have been various criticisms of Truste in the past and new paper by researcher Benjamin Edelman Adverse Selection in Online “Trust†Certifications finds that eTrust certified sites are actually “more than twice as likely to be untrustworthy as uncertified sites”. Interesting reading.
Consumer confidence in Internet commerce is declining due to the constant bad news about spyware, keyloggers, phishing and so on. Trust certification organizations that don’t live up to their claims further contribute to the problem. As the paper points out, one problem with these organizations is sites pay money for permission to display the logo. There’s every incentive for the certification organization to sign up as many sites as they can, and little incentive to police site behavior and withdraw certifications when they violate policy.
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