Deep Dive: How the News and Media Sector Scores on Security and Privacy
In April 2019 the Internet Society’s Online Trust Alliance released its 10th annual Online Trust Audit & Honor Roll. The Audit looks at the security and privacy practices of over 1,000 of the top sites in various sectors. The news and and media sector, compromised of the top 100 news and media sites according to US traffic to their websites, improved its privacy practices in 2018. Like most sites, however, there is still room for improvement in privacy statements.
In 2017 less than half (48%) of news and media sites made the Honor Roll. In 2018 that number went up significantly to 78%, largely due to improvements in privacy statements. Privacy is scored in two ways in the Audit, we look at trackers on each site and we score the privacy statements across over 30 criteria.
One area where news sites did not improve was in the use of trackers on their site. Out of all the sectors news and media scored the lowest in trackers with a score of 39 (out of 45). Part of the reason for this is the news and media sector relies on advertising revenue, which often requires the use of trackers to serve ads.
