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Trusted zones (I)

Sommaire :

1. Introduction
2. Quality trademarks : what for ?
3. Some reasons why we should be careful

1 Introduction

The number of people involved in E-business who are willing to make Internauts feel safer has been growing steadily. To do so, one of the most popular solution is to have one's site certified by reliable partners.

Consequently, more and more labels and certifications systems -in other words, quality trademarks- have mushroomed. Now to come back to back to what we often pointed out, the current abundance in this field will not be of any help to E-consumers, not to mention the fact that the profusion of quality trademarks will maybe have an adverse effect to what they were created for. Indeed, on the one hand consumers will be totally lost whereas on the other hand the serious offers of trustworthy organisations will be marked down.

You may say I am sawing the branch I have been sitting on. However, I shall try and show that the solution is -at least partly- doomed to failure if some fundamental changes do not occur in our global approach to the Internet.

2 Quality trademarks : what for ?

First and foremost, it must be said that if exposes such a mark, a site will respect a couple of rules. Let's think further on. Let's imagine a site which advertises a superb seal and behaves faultlessly with its clients and its suppliers. Will all this be enough to make its sales take off (or its traffic, its advertisement incomings, the number of prospects or contacts, depending the editor's objectives) ? It is not certain.

The problem is far more complicated, and is linked with the general context of the Internet. To begin with, some questions have to be asked :

• Do you consider the Internet as a high quality tool ?
• What is the proportion of sites that inform consumers correctly ?
• What is the proportion of sites that have a real policy concerning personal data and a clear, definite ethic position ?
• What proportion of these sites inform their users about it ?
• What is the proportion of sites that are adapted and conceived to the best of their users interests ?
• Eventually, what is the proportion of sites that manage the quality of their on-line services as they used to manage their off-line traditional ones before ?

In my opinion, the answer to all these questions is always the same : the proportions are small.

Aren't you convinced ? Type the first word that comes to your mind in a search engine, and give your opinion about the sites that appear on the first three pages. So what ?

Are the results homogeneous ? are all the sites of a high quality ? Do they come up to your expectations. If the answer is yes, you are probably lucky, but however very optimistic or terribly naive, don't hide your head in the sand, since all that comes hereafter will bring you down at one stage or another.

3 Some reasons why we should be careful

About the Internet in general :

• The research tool are not always efficient (and this is probably not going for the best -read the article (in french) "SEO and e-quality" about it).
• The amount of information is considerable, heterogeneous and unlimited at the same time.
• The sites do not always care about informing, committing themselves, reassuring.
• The management of personal data often lacks in precision and it is not ruled by minimal legal ethical rules.
• People with illegal behaviours have absolutely the same easiness of access to the Internet as honest ones.
• Most international legal tools cannot repress illegal behaviours.
• Personal sites are side by side with institutional and professional sites and it is easy for them to look like the latter.
• Professional sites can go on existing irrespective of the survival and existence of their parent company.
• The general public keeps having vague, ill defined ideas about the safety of computing exchanges.

All these reasons lead the internauts to assess the risks they take using any particular service all by themselves.

Logically, quality trademarks are displayed on a site so as to say : "On this site, you are on the safe side, the agents inform you and commit themselves to give you the best performance".

Unfortunately, this process has a big flaw insofar as it takes place in an individual context whereas the main point of the reasons harming confidence is of a collective nature. It is likely that the growing number of quality trademarks will strengthen the confidence in some sites, but the reasons undermining this confidence will go on living forever on today's Internet.

In the second part of this article, we shall try and tackle some ideas which could enable to work with the certification organizations in their ongoing process.

traduction : Marie-Anne Cazenave