

Ask HN: Is it time for a privacy rating system for the web? - beagle1809

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.<p>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 &quot;Red&quot; ratings.<p>There are efforts such as Mozilla Collusion (https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;collusion&#x2F;) 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.<p>What are people&#x27;s thoughts&#x2F;ideas on implementing a web wide system such as this or are there any efforts to do so which I am unaware of?
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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.

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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.

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stevejalim
Have you come across [http://tosdr.org/](http://tosdr.org/) yet? Not precisely
what you're talking about, but it does seem they take it into account in their
ratings

