A survey conducted by Benjamin Edelman in January 2006 found that sites with TRUSTe certification were 50% more likely to violate privacy policies than uncertified sites.[7]
TRUSTe counters these charges with the argument that punishing “bad guys” and terminating rule breakers does not further TRUSTe’s mission of increasing trust between businesses and consumers. To accomplish that mission, TRUSTe works with companies to change business practices for the benefit of consumers.

Ben is a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Economics at Harvard University and a student at the Harvard Law School. He previously studied economics and statistics as a student at Harvard College.

Ben's recent research agenda includes evaluation of registrations in new TLDs, a quantitative comparison of commercial and non-commercial uses of the Internet, and an examination of Internet filtering efforts by governments worldwide.

When at the Berkman Center, Ben's projects included analyzing the formative documents and continued activities of ICANN, running Berkman Center webcasts, and developing software tools for real-time use in meetings, classes, and special events. Ben previously oversaw ICANN Public Meeting webcasts and operated the technology used at ICANN's quarterly meetings. More recently, he wrote about domain name politics, particularly in the context of expired domain names subsequently used for pornography and registered with false WHOIS data.

Ben has served as a consulting and testifying expert for a variety of clients, including the ACLU, the National Association of Broadcasters, the National Football League, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Wells Fargo.

Ben Edelman is a student at Harvard and a researcher at its Berkman Center for Internet & Society, where he studies and writes about the Internet, its design, and its uses. He served as an expert witness on blocking programs in the ACLU's challenge to the Children's Internet Protection Act, a federal statute requiring the use of such programs in public libraries. He would like to continue his research on N2H2, but cannot proceed further without being able to access and examine its full list of blocked sites. To do this he will have to "reverse engineer" N2H2's program to figure out what security measures are preventing him from reviewing the list. With that information he can create a software tool to "circumvent" those measures and create a readable version of the list for review. He then wants to publish the block list, the circumvention tool that he used to get the list, and the results of his analysis of the list. Given the increasing role of blocking programs as an official means of censoring use of the Internet, the kind of research Ben does is an important means for citizens to monitor the software and its potential for abuse.

Don't you think people will start to wonder why ATS needs a third party to take care of these things? Has there been problems in the past? Is there really a need for more bureaucracy?