by Fran Maier

I’d like to thank all of you, our sealholders, as well as the TRUSTe staff and board of directors, for making 2004 a terrific year for TRUSTe. A few highlights:

• Welcoming many new sealholders, enlarging our footprint within industries and building our brand among consumers
• Launching IronPort’s Bonded Sender program certified by TRUSTe. TRUSTe provides the only transparent legitimate email-sender certification and dispute-resolution services in the marketplace. Bonded Senders are reporting higher delivery and open rates at Hotmail and thousands of other receiving networks and ISPs.
• Holding the “Privacy Futures” conference in San Francisco with the International Association of Privacy Professionals in San Francisco in June 2004 -- a decidedly different privacy conference focused on brand trust. The two organizations also organized more than 30 KnowledgeNet luncheons across the United States and Europe last year.
• Increasing our reputation as an expert in consumer attitudes and behavior through an extensive research schedule. This year TRUSTe partnered with leading privacy think tank Ponemon Institute to name the Most Trusted Company in Privacy, and launched a Quarterly Consumer Privacy Index with global survey leader (and TRUSTe sealholder) TNS.

Other significant changes include License Agreement 9.0, a relaunched Web site, and improved, streamlined certification and self-assessment processes.

2005 Goals

I also am tempted to thank the fraudulent and nefarious for making our work so much more challenging and meaningful -- but I won’t go that far. For those of us working to build sustainable trust with consumers through privacy, security, and brand trust, 2004 effectively set the stage for the legislative, technical, business, and policy developments for the coming year. Here are some things to keep in mind as we go into 2005:

1. Authentication. Everywhere. Online and offline. The act of asserting your identity through a reliable communication channel remains a critical building block of any anti-spam or anti-phishing effort. Without authentication, we can’t efficiently and quickly deter the bad actors, and we will not be able to use more sophisticated reputation and accreditation services. The FTC’s November 2004 workshop on e-mail authentication provided a forum for industry leaders to discuss approaches, timing, and issues. Clearly, we need to move this forward more quickly in 2005.
2. Accreditation. While authentication is perhaps the first building block to restoring trust to email, accreditation -- validating sender and marketer email policies -- will become increasingly important as we continue to distinguish legitimate players from bad actors. TRUSTe is playing an important role in the development of accreditation based on our reputation as a certification authority. Accreditation services that provide more information on consent, legal compliance, and unsubscribes and communicate with wider audiences -– consumers, agents, enablers -- will only increase this relevance over time. Finally, as we see consumers gaining more choice and control, accreditation will serve as an important guidepost for consumers to use in determining where to place their trust.
3. Consumer choice and control. New technologies, new abuses, and new regulations will drive consumers to demand more control over their personally identifiable information. Opt-in is one way, but so are efforts to improve unsubscribes, account management, privacy notices, and a range of other new processes and technologies. This issue will not be confined to the Web. We are already seeing it affect telemarketing (witness the succss of the Do-Not-Call Registry), RFID, wireless technologies, and points of sale. Ensuring consumer control won’t be easy. TRUSTe is working on a number of initiatives such as the “point of email collection” website seal to distinguish companies that follow best practices in permission and choice, in this case for email.
4. Allaying consumer fears. As the words spam, viruses, worms, phishing, and zombies enter into our everyday speech, it appears that consumers are coming to fear the Internet as much as they rely on it. We need to more aggressively help consumers protect themselves from these threats. California now requires that consumers be notified of data breaches. FCRA amendments require free credit reports for consumers so they can check for evidence of ID theft. Anti-spyware programs empower consumers to root out malicious programs. Despite these efforts, the consumer is still left unprotected in basic ways. Addressing the causes of consumers’ fears over privacy in a way that protects industry’s ability to form and develop legitimate consumer relationships is critical to the ongoing viability of the Internet. Our member-only, monthly Policy Flash keeps you abreast of government activities to help protect consumers on the Internet.

TRUSTe will continue to work closely with industry and governmental groups -- as well as with many of you directly -- to get your perspectives on these developments. Through our events, email newsletters, and Web site, we will help you stay up to date. The coming year should prove to be an exciting time in privacy.

Fran Maier is the president and executive director of TRUSTe.

 

MAXAMINE