********* http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,35587,00.html Odd Privacy Ratings Exposed by Declan McCullagh ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) 3:00 a.m. Apr. 12, 2000 PDT Marc Rotenberg is nothing if not a privacy zealot. As the founder of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, he's spent the last decade arguing, pleading, and agitating for everyone to take the topic even half as seriously as he does. So it was something of a surprise for Rotenberg to learn the epic.org site received only two of a possible four stars from enonymous, a San Diego company that published what it billed as a "comprehensive" privacy survey on Tuesday. "Enonymous doesn't have a clue. It doesn't even have close to a clue about evaluating a privacy policy," Rotenberg said. EPIC isn't alone in finding bizarre errors and odd oversights in enonymous' database, designed to tell anyone using the company's "advisor" software what the privacy practices of websites are. That same database was used to produce Tuesday's survey, which said that of the 1,000 most-trafficked sites on the Web, 8.6 percent deserved four stars. Although enonymous claims 30,000 entries using "strict, objective criteria," that list does not include popular Microsoft properties that receive millions of visitors, and incorrectly says places like geek-culture destination slashdot.org have no privacy standards. Even when websites are listed, the entries are frequently contradictory. CNet properties download.com, help.com, and search.com have word-for-word identical privacy policies, but receive respective ratings of one, two, and three stars out of four. Other sites suffer the same problem. Hotbot.com, suck.com, and wired.com (all are owned by Lycos, also the parent company of Wired News) link to the same Web page for their privacy statements -- but inexplicably receive one, two, and three stars. Tim Kane, enonymous's co-founder and director of privacy, said he couldn't explain the problems. "It might be a glitch in our database," he said. [...]
