Google “Trust” & You Won’t Find Google There

According to an annual survey taken by the Ponemon Institute and TRUSTe, Google, as of 2008, is no longer trusted. Oh, how the mighty have fallen!

 The San Francisco-based groups noted that Google’s fall from the leagues of “trusted” to “not trusted” puts it in company with such ne’er-do-wells as Countrywide Financial and Bank of America (which acquired Countrywide). When a search engine is getting the same treatment as failing banks you know that the economy is wacky.

 This notion is made even more apparent when considering the fact that Nationwide, the embattled insurance carrier, maintained a spot at ninth for the most trusted companies, and U.S. Bank and eLoan remained in the top 20.

 American Express retained its position at number 1 for the fourth year in a row (this is the survey’s 5^th year), with eBay, IBM, Amazon and Johnson & Johnson rounding out the top five.

 The Ponemon Institute conducted the interview by collecting over 6000 people and asking them which companies they trusted most and least. The answers were then weighted by the subjects’ age, gender and household income to comport with U.S. census data.

 When the data was broken down some surprising trends emerged from the numbers. 45 percent of the responders said that they feel in control of their personal information – a drop from last year’s 48 percent, and further away from the 56 percent in 2006. More than half of those questioned (60 percent) indicated that identity theft negatively affects how they think about a company, and almost as many said they are concerned when a company sends notifications of data breaches.

The CEO of TRUSTe, Fran Maier, said that the results indicated that consumers were becoming more astute about privacy. Dr. Larry Ponemon, the chairman and founder of The Ponemon Institute, said that larger companies, such as IBM, are trusted because of a strong brand, and others, like Apple, are trusted because of the products they sell. With regards to search engines, Dr. Ponemon felt that many people feel sorry for Yahoo! because of the company’s troubles with rivals Microsoft and Google. “Google (and Microsoft) suffer from big company syndrome, people figure that if you’re big and collecting data, there must be an issue.”

An overarching trend among companies that are trusted by consumers is the presence of good privacy practices. Chris Kelly, Facebook’s chief privacy officer, said that the social network earns peoples’ trust by empowering them. “It shouldn’t be binary, where you either reveal a piece of data to everyone on the Internet or Facebook or not at all,” he said. “We think people want to share more information, but they want choices.”