On June 14th, the Online Trust Alliance (OTA) issued its 2016 Online Trust Audit & Honor Roll. A self-described “benchmark analysis of businesses’ commitment to security, privacy and consumer protection”, the audit was the eighth consecutive effort by the OTA. Results included approximately 1,000 websites across various industries in the private and public sector.
Points were awarded for domain, brand and consumer protection, site, server and infrastructure security and privacy, transparency and disclosures. The highest achieving sectors were consumer services, FDIC top 100 banks and top 100 Internet retailers, while the lowest achieving sector was news and media sites.
And the overall top sites were: (1) Twitter, (2) HealthCare.gov, (3) Pinterest, (4) the White House, (5) Dropbox, (6) FileYourTaxes, (7) LifeLock, (8) Instagram, (9) 1040.com; and (10) Gap Inc. Among the many audit findings were that only four percent of sites honored consumers’ “Do Not Track” browser settings and 26% of sites were vulnerable to basic bot attacks.
The full OTA 2016 Online Trust Audit & Honor Roll is available here. Contact us at Ossian Law regarding any information technology law matter.
© 2016 Ossian Law P.C.