Digital + Electronics Life + Pinoy

eBay topped the most trusted company in terms of privacy according to a recent study. Facebook stole the spotlight by securing the 10th place.

The two-part study from Ponemon Institute and Truste – both privacy specialists, surveyed more than 6,000 U.S. consumers. The latest survey mostly reflects which companies were seems to have the best privacy practices based on consumer brand perception and doesn’t necessarily translate to the most trustworthy companies.

Top 10 Most Trusted Companies In Privacy

1. ebay
2. Verizon
3. US Postal Service
4. WebMD
5. IBM
6. Procter & Gamble
7. Nationwide
8. Intuit
9. Yahoo
10. Facebook

This is the first time a social network company – Facebook, to break the top 10 list. Facebook had been on the privacy blunders in the past but because of  the new privacy features that Facebook has offered, they were able to convinced the panel of judges to give the company a top spot on the “trusted list”. Some of the features added recently is the include friend list and increased control over public listings.

Among the criteria that were used in assessing the level of trustworthiness is whether a company:

• has a clear readability and easy to find privacy statement
• provides adequate access to account information
• uses cookies and discloses that to users
• shares data with other companies and affiliates
• has a data retention policy
• has a chief privacy officer
• whether they disclose a user’s e-mail during password reset
• and whether they use Web beacons.

What companies do you trust to guard your privacy?

Google’s Gmail service was inaccessible last Tuesday in a severe outage that  affected a majority of users  who are relying on Google’s popular free e-mail service.

Google explained that  Tuesday’s widespread outage occurred when the company took some servers offline to perform their scheduled routine maintenance. This  caused  its remaining routers to become overloaded with traffic.

Ben Treynor, a Google vice president of engineering apologized on their blog ““Thus, right up front, I’d like to apologize to all of you — today’s outage was a Big Deal, and we’re treating it as such,”. He wrote” We’ve turned our full attention to helping ensure this kind of event doesn’t happen again. Some of the actions are straightforward and are already done — for example, increasing request router capacity well beyond peak demand to provide headroom”.

Twitter users were trading updates about Gmail’s problems and became the a top trending topic on that day.

Google reported Tuesday afternoon that it fixed the problem.