Interesting paper on PKI and TRUSTe

[Aram Perez]

Abstract

Widely-used online "trust" authorities issue certifications without  
substantial verification of the actual trustworthiness of recipients.  
Their lax approach gives rise to adverse selection: The sites that  
seek and obtain trust certifications are actually significantly less  
trustworthy than those that forego certification. I demonstrate this  
adverse selection empirically via a new dataset on web site  
characteristics and safety. I find that TRUSTe-certified sites are  
more than twice as likely to be untrustworthy as uncertified sites, a  
difference which remains statistically and economically significant  
when restricted to "complex" commercial sites. I also present  
analogous results of adverse selection in search engine advertising -  
finding ads at leading search engines to be more than twice as likely  
to be untrustworthy as corresponding organic search results for the  
same search terms.

See http://www.benedelman.org/publications/advsel-trust-draft.pdf

Enjoy,
Aram Perez

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