Rating Indicator Criteria for Privacy Policies

This short paper describes ongoing research to identify the legal and policy criteria necessary for the development of meaningful privacy rating indicators. Previous and current attempts to provide online privacy rating indicators such as grades and nutrition labels thus far have had only limited success and have not been widely adopted. The purpose of this research is to review the history of online privacy rating indicators, to identify deficiencies and obstacles to meaningful ratings, and to map the requirements or criteria that need to be established in law and policy for indicators to be meaningful and successful.