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.

Email address

[dingo]

The way I gauge how to trust is as follows

Ask for email address without apparent reason=back away slowly avoiding eye contact

Others=trust
:)

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

Microsoft most trusted?

[phalse phace]

Hmmm... must have been them dead people [slashdot.org] answering them surveys. How else can you explain it?

CNet news.com could be a contender

[Ryu2]

Fluffy articles with little to no technical content, error-prone reporting (especially of anything not MS or Intel), superficial quotes from "analysts", for example: "shutting down Napster will cause problems for their users" or "The slowdown will cause a decline in tech spending among companies" -- they get paid for this???

Also, most of their articles touting new products, etc are really thinly-veiled adverts for MS, Intel, etc. and never seem to badmouth anything too badly. Their "videos" are also little more than mouthpieces for company spokespeople to get their point across.

NEVER trust CNN

[Menteb]

Do NOT EVER trust what you see on CNN! They manipulate everything. If you want news, go BBC World!

Greetz

Menteb