Friendster is the popular social networking website, where one can — with pictures, testimonials and messages — keep up with one’s friends or make new ones. TRUSTe is an industry self-regulator of online privacy practices.
Websites that sign the TRUSTe license get to to post the TRUSTe trademark and have to follow certain guidelines in their privacy practices. These guidelines include disclosure, a few user controls, an internal complaint procedure and an agreement to abide by TRUSTe’s consumer dispute resolution process. I have no idea how good the process is.
Some of Friendster’s actions recently caught my notice — they started allowing Friendster members to see who had viewed one’s profile. They still allowed people to browse anonymously. Now, when you browse anonymously, you also are blind to who has seen your profile. All very interesting experimentation by Friendster. But it made me curious about my anonymity settings and their privacy practices. So I decided to look into it.
Trademark Infringement?
Something is wrong here. Either Friendster is infringing TRUSTe’s mark or TRUSTe has an error in their verification script.
Going to the page which sets your settings, anonymous browsing, and other features, one is displayed with a Friendster Privacy notice on the right hand side (screenshot).
Clicking on that TRUSTe logo there takes us to Friendster’s privacy page, which includes the TRUSTe seal (screenshot).
But, clicking on the button to verify, we get sent to TRUSTe’s site, which tells us that Friendster is not verified (again, click for a screenshot).
Whats going on?
I pressed the TRUSTe button to file a “watchdog complaint.” More people should to so that we can resolve this. If someone as big as Friendster (and so full of personal information — like email addresses, lists of interests, lists of friends and connections) can violate TRUSTe so willy-nilly, then the TRUSTe self regulation system is a bit of a joke. Then again, it could also be a mistake with TRUSTe’s verification system.
