TRUSTe standards

Industry Enterprise Team to Develop Wireless Privacy Standards
TRUSTe unveiled a new wireless privacy standards program aimed at providing wireless telecom vendors with actionable and practical guidelines for protecting consumer privacy. TRUSTe teamed with a number of major corporations, including AT&T Wireless, MMA and Microsoft, to form the Wireless Advisory Committee responsible for implementing the new standards. Dubbed the Wireless Privacy Principles and Implementation Guidelines, the program will work with companies in the industry to ensure that specific standards regarding consumer notice and consumer consent are achieved. Some of the key areas on which the guidelines focus are privacy statements, third party sharing and the use of location-based information.

Source: PR Newswire

I am really curious to see the actual guidelines that TRUSTe will provide to the industry. Considering that some of the major players in this organization are notorious for privacy oversights (i.e. MS passport problems for example) it is an interesting alliance. I am curious to see how many loopholes they will create and whether the guidelines will take consumer privacy as a concept, seriously. It is an unfortunate turn of events, that considerations of consumer privacy in this country is so immediately associated with revenue losses. I believe that despite DoubleClick's pronouncements in the NYTimes a few days ago that consumers are "relaxing" about privacy, privacy concerns, coupled with continued corporate and government privacy violations, may create a paranoid sort of consumer. Unfortunately, human lazyness is on the side of the culprits :). If they make maintaining privacy as difficult, technically complex, and tedious, they may win :). Its the argument towards considering questions of privacy at the outset of system building, not as an add-on patch towards the end, just because privacy is a tough concept and, you, we are gonna just build first and then see if it works... Band-aids have a nasty feature of falling off eventually, even if they leave some black stains.