Certification issuer TRUSTe seal of approval questioned

Ben Edelman, Spyware researcher and member of SiteAdvisor's advisory board, has written an academic article after examining a sampling of 500,000+ top web sites as reported by a major ISP.

Of the sites certified by TRUSTe, he found 5.4% are untrustworthy according to SiteAdvisor's data, compared with just 2.5% untrustworthy sites in the rest of the ISP's list.

Edelman specifically named four sites certified (PDF) by TRUSTe as of January 2006:

Two of those companies, Direct-revenue.com and Maxmoolah.com no longer hold TRUSTe certification, however Ben points out TRUSTe need not have certified them in the first place as "These companies' practices were bad all along"

http://www.benedelman.org/news/092506-1.html