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.

Pr0n?

[Dr_Cheeks]

Frankly, I think that our friends the pr0nographers are way more untrustworthy than AOL. At least AOL doesn't pop-up and pop-under new windows at every given opportunity, including when you close the current browser window (man, I hate that). And they don't attempt to plant suspicious (and occasionally incriminating) cookies on your HD, or do any of those other wonderful tricks that help your boss/parents/significant other argue that you're not doing anything productive on the net. And I'd sure feel better about giving my CC# to AOL than to pr0n sites (we're just using it to check your age, no really....)

AOL are no saints, but they do seem to have developed some scruples as a sort of reponse to potentially bad publicity.

And this is a surprise...

[Anonymous Coward]

because people are generally known to implicitly trust huge corporations in general?

It's not AOL, Microsoft, or anybody big

[InsaneGeek]

My biggest fear would be someone who is *not* under public scrutiny like larger companies. Look how many small companies constantly try to fly under the radar and install spyware onto your computer in their latest release. The whole Gator thing is a perfect example of this, they start off initially as a company who helps people autocomplete forms on websites, then they start sending rival adds to pages that you goto, then they intentionally build an app to go over the existing banner add on the page.

A company like Microsoft would *never* be able to get away with a gator like stunt, someone would be suing the heck out of them (the government would have their antitrust lawyers out like a pack of ravenous wolfs). Only people who seem to get away with doing stuff like this is the small little company that nobody seems to really care about; but that company is the first in line to screw you over in dirty little tricks.

Consumer lock-in

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Does anyone else find it interesting that the two companies who are prime examples of consumer lock-in (AIM/Windows & Office) are the most distrusted companies on the 'net?

It's not the consumer lock-in that makes them distrusted, it's their abuse of the power that lock-in gives them.

Many other companies have something akin to consumer lock-in, and don't get the negative feedback. To give an obvious example, Java is a proprietary technology, and Sun does retain a high degree of control. However, Sun have never seriously screwed the Java community in several years, and have only really used the authority they have to defend the language, e.g., against Microsoft's Visual J++. As a result, people are much more prepared to give Sun credit for being trustworthy.

Much the same is true of Borland and C++ Builder, which has sufficiently many extensions to C++ that porting to another platform would be tricky. However, again, Borland have consistently maintained the product and thus kept their customers happy.

Now compare and contrast these with MS, whose new OS and office suite offer precious little new functionality and the same old bugs, as reported in numerous reviews by the IT press. And yet, in exchange, they're looking for a blank cheque from your company HQ, because they're Microsoft and so they're obviously worth it. Is it surprising that people distrust such a company?

I trust my ISP

[TWR]

one's current ISP is always a good recipient of distrust.

Maybe not trusting your ISP is a side-effect of using one of the large, faceless companies as an ISP. I use sonic.net (www.sonic.net), which is relatively small, has great tech support, provides equipment status (and failure) notices on its home page, and is currently fighting SBC to overturn its new, restrictive DSL contract.

I pay about $5/month more for my DSL with Sonic than I would with SBC, but I get a static IP address, no limitations on running a server, a shell account, 50MB of web space on their server, and I get a nice warm feeling from supporting a mom-and-pop company.

If you don't trust your ISP, you've got to wonder why you're giving them money in the first place.

-jon