
Ask HN: Privacy Badge for Websites? - technotarek
Do you think there&#x27;s a market&#x2F;need&#x2F;room for a &quot;privacy&quot; badge for websites — something that calculates a score indicating how much tracking is going on (or not) on your site. The idea would be to incentivize less tracking and give low tracking sites a badge of honor for doing so. As things currently stand, it seems like it&#x27;s all cooked into the browsers, for those in the know that use the right plugins etc (uBlock, disconnect etc). Plenty of non-technical people (e.g. lots of my family members) care, but don&#x27;t really know what is what or what to do about it, but perhaps they would start to recognize a seal of approval of some sort.<p>Take for example two sites, one that use a non-tracking version for its various social media sharing buttons vs another that uses the highly invasive ones that track you everywhere. In most cases, the average user has no idea that one site, one company etc made a conscious choice to respect the privacy of its users.<p>Heck, if Apple can spend $MM on an ad campaign that just says &quot;Privacy.&quot;, then there might even be an actual business model buried in this, just as Google Page Rank etc helped the SEO industry<i>. Imagine a point in the not so distant future where people prefer a site that has the A+ Privacy badge.<p></i>I wish I had a better example here. I work in SEO, yet loathe the industry at the same time.
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JohnFen
I'm skeptical of the idea for a number of reasons, but I don't see any harm in
someone trying.

My skepticism is based on questions like:

How is the presence of tracking determined? It can be hard to detect tracking
when done by the site itself, and even harder to determine if that site allows
access to the data it has collected.

Will people pay any attention? The web is full of various badges and
certifications (mostly around security), and I expect that most people are
blind to them now. Would they notice a new one? And if they did, would they
consider it actually meaningful?

How would the badge-granting process minimize the gaming of the system. You
work in SEO, so you know very well how such things can be gamed.

I have a number of other such questions, but I think those are the big ones.

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anthony_gl
Once I thought about the same thing but I think it's quite hard to create an
organization that can deeply track what other companies are doing in terms of
user privacy (and then provide an official badge for it). But I have to say
that there is already a big difference if a website stores data in US or
Europe.

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handoff
I don’t think the regular user would care much though.

I’m guessing the website would be regularly monitored. What if they implement
some VW emissions cheat style to pretend they track less than they really do

