4 ms·

I think any "bad" actors will simply display the easier-to-achieve privacy icons and not display poor privacy icons (this is contrary to the authors opinion tha

I think any "bad" actors will simply display the easier-to-achieve privacy icons and not display poor privacy icons (this is contrary to the authors opinion that bad actors will decide to display none at all). The issue is consumers will start to see "black circle with green ring" and associate it with good privacy, whether or not the site displayed all 5 or only 1 or 2 of them. To summarize, it is worse for a consumer to be misled about a website's privacy policy than to not display one at all.

Silhouette 15y ago
I think you're right about the danger of conditioning users to trust a certain symbol. See also: anything with a yellow padlock icon or a brightly coloured shield icon. > To summarize, it is worse for a consumer to be misled about a website's privacy policy than to not display one at all. On a related note, the descriptions for the negative icons aren't in the form "can't promise this good thing", they are in the form "does this bad thing". If Mozilla started displaying those negative icons against any site just because the site didn't follow their non-standard privacy policy protocol/mark-up, then that would be not only misleading to users but potentially damaging to sites that really do take privacy seriously and happen to say so in plain $LANGUAGE rather than using Mozilla's pre-defined, machine-readable categories. That also sounds to me like a lawsuit waiting to happen if anyone's traffic stats suggest that they are taking a hit because of Mozilla's misdescription.
ktsmith 15y ago
A lot of scummy sites use static "secure site" logos which have no backing in order to deceive the user into believing the site has some sort of security in place. These mimic the geotrust and hacker safe logos typically but I've seen all kinds. Bad actors have no problem misleading consumers by duplicating common "indicators" of positive reputation and are already actively doing so. A new set of privacy icons would just as easily and quickly be deployed to deceive consumers further.

Silhouette 15y ago

I think you're right about the danger of conditioning users to trust a certain symbol. See also: anything with a yellow padlock icon or a brightly coloured shield icon. > To summarize, it is worse for a consumer to be misled about a website's privacy policy than to not display one at all. On a related note, the descriptions for the negative icons aren't in the form "can't promise this good thing", they are in the form "does this bad thing". If Mozilla started displaying those negative icons against any site just because the site didn't follow their non-standard privacy policy protocol/mark-up, then that would be not only misleading to users but potentially damaging to sites that really do take privacy seriously and happen to say so in plain $LANGUAGE rather than using Mozilla's pre-defined, machine-readable categories. That also sounds to me like a lawsuit waiting to happen if anyone's traffic stats suggest that they are taking a hit because of Mozilla's misdescription.

ktsmith 15y ago

A lot of scummy sites use static "secure site" logos which have no backing in order to deceive the user into believing the site has some sort of security in place. These mimic the geotrust and hacker safe logos typically but I've seen all kinds. Bad actors have no problem misleading consumers by duplicating common "indicators" of positive reputation and are already actively doing so. A new set of privacy icons would just as easily and quickly be deployed to deceive consumers further.