HN Explorer

Ask HN: Is it time for a privacy rating system for the web?

4 points by beagle1809 ↗ HN
A simple rating system for the privacy of a particular website. Perhaps in the form of traffic lights as seen for calories on food products in the U.K. Any way which makes it easy for everyday users.

A system such as this could have a very positive effect on making the layman more aware of privacy. It may also act to discourage sites from those "Red" ratings.

There are efforts such as Mozilla Collusion (https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/collusion/) which acts as a plugin. The problems with these systems is that is puts the onus on the users and totally excludes non-expert users from privacy.

What are people's thoughts/ideas on implementing a web wide system such as this or are there any efforts to do so which I am unaware of?

3 comments

[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 20.2 ms ] thread
stevejalim
Have you come across http://tosdr.org/ yet? Not precisely what you're talking about, but it does seem they take it into account in their ratings
conroy
A web-wide system isn't feasible. A websites respect for your privacy is an issue of trust and not something you can easily quantify. For example, DuckDuckGo promises not to track you (and I believe they don't) but proving this claim is impossible without access to the server.
artas_bartas
Isn't such idea counter-intuitive? The most successful websites, the ones who rake millions from targeted ads & deals with third parties, will have least reasons to open their system up. So you will ultimately end up with several hundred niche, privacy-friendly websites never visited by the general surfing public.