This past summer 12 of the world’s largest high tech companies -- including AltaVista, IBM, Intel and Microsoft -- announced plans to partner with online privacy group TRUSTe by committing money to a national advertising campaign aimed at educating consumers about online privacy standards and practices.

A reporter asked Bob Lewin, TRUSTe’s CEO and executive director, how the company would convince the public that the effort was sincere and the industry's voluntary privacy measures would be effective. Lewin responded by saying, "I think there is sufficient reason to believe we want to live up to the expectations we are preaching."

Those expectations are now being taken with the proverbial grain of salt as researchers, federal officials, politicians and the general public increasingly view this experiment in self-regulation as a failure, the Los Angeles Times reports.

"Self-regulation just didn't do the trick," Jay Stanley, an Internet policy analyst at Forrester Research, told the Times. "These seal programs haven't taken the wind out of the sails of (proposed government) regulation."

An international advocacy group recently gave TRUSTe and two other leading online services, BBBOnLine and WebTrust, failing grades for basic privacy protection.

The Federal Trade Commission earlier this year backed off from its support of industry self-regulation, and the recent dot-com "shakeout" has released many consumer databases into the open market as online firms go belly-up.

For their part, these seal programs say more time is needed to gain public acceptance and foster growth in their programs. In their defense, new Web sites are signing up for the voluntary standards, and many Internet users are more aware of privacy issues.

Out of the hundreds of thousands of Web sites, however, fewer than 3,000 have privacy seals from the three services mentioned. Only 25 percent of the 100 largest e-commerce sites have seals, and no site has ever had its seal suspended or revoked by these three firms, the newspaper reports.

These various elements have come together to boost the chances for the passage of online privacy legislation by Congress within the next year, the L.A. Times reports.

"Privacy needs to be protected comprehensively," Evan Hendricks, publisher of Privacy Times, told the newspaper. "You can have seal programs and company policies. But it has to be backed up by the law."

Full text of the article is currently found at:
http://www.latimes.com/business/
20001211/t000118403.html