Netscape Trust Rating System not trustworthy

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According to Ben Edelman, Netscape's new Trust Rating Feature is not trustworthy. Edelman points out that the system which attempts to tell users which sites are "safe" by showing an on-screen indication when the system believes a site to be trustworthy, uses thirdf party criteria to determine whether or not a site is safe.

The browser automatically adjusts its security settings when it recognizes a site as "safe" -- letting a site use ActveX and switch to the IE rendering engine. The criteria list is maintained by TRUSTe on basis of whether or not a website posts a web site privacy policy or not and if it agrees to mediate disputes in a particular way, but lacks serious enforcement procedures.

The Trust Rating Feature is part of the newly released Netscape 8 by Netscape Inc., which has acquired by AOL (now AOL Time Warner) in 1998, around the time of the founding of the Mozilla Project, the open source web browser project, which continued the further development of the standards developed by Netscapes once leading web browser technology.

source: http://www.benedelman.org/spyware/ns8/