Enonymous's "Odd Privacy Ratings"

When the Electronic Privacy Information Center gets a poor privacy rating, you might think something's wrong. It is. Enonymous.com is apparently giving out weird ratings to many Web sites, including this one - earlier, it claimed Slashdot had no privacy policy and now it wrongly claims we share your data without permission. Other sites were getting different readings though they linked to the same policy. Meanwhile, Enonymous' own privacy policy has been challenged. I'm left wondering - if even experts can't make sense of online privacy policies, what good do they do?

Experts?

[turg]

Define "expert" -- who is "enonymous.com" and why do I care what they say? Currently their web server appears to have gone down hard (any URL under their domain returns the error "the requested resource is in use") so I don't know what they call themselves but from what I've read on the other links posted here, I wouldn't call them "privacy experts" -- more like a market research firm (which some might consider the opposite, as they are in the business of gathering and sharing data). See the mailing list post [politechbot.com] linked above.

Perhaps this is part of the problem? For these people to criticize the privacy policies of other internet companies seems like a conflict of interest, as these are either their competition or potential customers.

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another /. editor asleep at the wheel

[RobotSlave]

Oh, lordy. Jamie didn't do his/her homework on this one.

One look at the "research [privacyratings.org]" done by venture-capital driven enonymous would have been enough to figure out that this "story" didn't merit a post, not even in the comment-free void of the "second" pages. The marketing drivel would be funny if it weren't so depressing

enonymous is very, very interested in selling data that you might consider private to other companies-- they're obviously collecting things like age and gender, but if you read between the lines, you can see that they're trying to make money collecting other things-- like your web browsing profile, and, especially, your online purchasing history. Your name won't be sent back to enonymous along with the profiling data. That's nice, but what if your employer is a client of enonymous, and you find their "browser assistant" software preinstalled on your computer? The data that enonymous designates as "private" won't be transmitted back to enonymous, but it will certainly be available to your employer (minus the credit card number-- they can figure it out because they know your name, your social security number, and your IP number). And they can do whatever the hell they want to with it. Or how about your ISP? Did the enonymous software install itself as part of your ISP's bloated mass of "setup" software?

Any company that buys enonymous' service will deserve to be flattened by the cluetrain [cluetrain.com], if it ever arrives.

Frankly, I think privacy is dead (in the US, at least). The sooner I get over it, the better.

Yep, this site is totally bogus

[abcess]

Decided to take a look at the ir information for DoubleClick

This place looks worse than the farce that calls themselves TRUSTe.

Yep, this site is totally bogus...2nd try

[abcess]

Oops, screwed that one up....OH! that's what the preview button is there for <grin>

Anyways, decided to take a look at their information for DoubleClick [enonymous.com]

This place looks worse than the farce that calls themselves TRUSTe.

I would rant, but after seeing what they had to say about DoubleClick, the results seem to speak loud enough.

CORTEX INDEX

[jacks0n]

Nevermind privacy, that's a dead horse round these parts. (I think Bill Safire called the fear of beating a dead horse 'Vapulequimortiphobia')
The interesting thing there is the psuedoscientific "CORTEX INDEX" which, according to their website will tell you...

Does the site attract a analytical audience, or a more creative type of average visitor? By analyzing the interests of enonymous community members who visit a site, we've generated a fun index number which estimates how "left" or "right-brained" the average visitor is.

Now what the hell does that mean??!! Slashdot gets a 3.6? I think we ought to be outraged about that. It doen't mean anything, but 3.6 is a low, low number. The russian judges would give us better numbers.