Who Do You Trust Least?

Mister Furious points to a story on Yahoo! "about how a recent study found AOL to be the least trusted site on the net. It even got lower trust ratings then Microsoft." It would be good to see the actual survey questions and results, since they're referred to only in vague terms. Partly because of that, the story could proabably appear in the Onion without raising many eyebrows -- it seems to tacitly acknowledge that to these companies, perception is more important than reality. If you don't use AOL or MSN, one's current ISP is always a good recipient of distrust.

Comments

Define trust...

[Nevrar]

"...consumers said they were highly distrustful..." I appreciate the news article is summarising, but really, I reckon they sorta need to define trust. I mean is it in terms of privacy, is it reliability of service? I.M.H.O. it could be taken to mean any number of different things by those being surveyed. I'm not sure you can seriously look at figures like that to mean anything (of course, it could just be a jounalistic summary of a more in-depth survey).

Significance?

[expunged]

The story mentions first 37 and 29 percent and then 15 and 17 percent, drawing HUGE differences -- Microsoft is referred to as nearly as trusted as online brokerages, while AOL is paraded as completely untrustable.

Is 2% (or even 8%) really that significant? It may seem huge, but it really depends on the survey size and how the questions are asked. Does anyone know more about how these surveys are done, their margins of error on average, etc?

I think they are jumping to conclusions on this one, unless they know more than they are telling. It almost seems like they are jumping on a "let's hate AOL" bandwagon. (Not that that's necessarily completely unfounded)

-nicole

Pr0n?

[Dr_Cheeks]

Frankly, I think that our friends the pr0nographers are way more untrustworthy than AOL. At least AOL doesn't pop-up and pop-under new windows at every given opportunity, including when you close the current browser window (man, I hate that). And they don't attempt to plant suspicious (and occasionally incriminating) cookies on your HD, or do any of those other wonderful tricks that help your boss/parents/significant other argue that you're not doing anything productive on the net. And I'd sure feel better about giving my CC# to AOL than to pr0n sites (we're just using it to check your age, no really....)

AOL are no saints, but they do seem to have developed some scruples as a sort of reponse to potentially bad publicity.

Re:The title is wrong

[juha0]

Do you trust slashdot ?

Nope. Every time I see a link that looks interesting, it leads me to site where this guy is bending over with his ass wide open!

What site do I trust least?

[rjh]

... anything ending in .gov.

Re:What site do I trust least?

[FatOldGoth]

I agree! That's why I'll always prefer the content of whitehouse.com over that of whitehouse.gov