Web sites courting Valentine's Day shoppers need to prove their commitment

TRUSTe-BizRate Survey Reveals a Distrust Of Sites that Do Not Post a Privacy Policy and/or Privacy Seals

San Francisco – February 10, 2004 – A survey conducted by leading comparison-shopping site BizRate.com and TRUSTe, shows that nearly half (or 46 percent) of consumers polled indicate that they intend to shop online this Valentine's Day season.

The survey, which polled 3,500 online buyers, shows that the traditional gifts of flowers and candy continue to top the list.  Overall, the top five most popular online categories this year will be: flowers, candy, DVDs, CDs, and jewelry.  Nearly one in four online shoppers (or 23 percent) said that intend to spend more this year on Valentine's Day gifts than they did one year ago.

However, the survey results show that shoppers remain wary of providing personal information to online sites that they do not trust.  Over three-quarters (78 percent) of all respondents stated that they are "uncomfortable" to "extremely uncomfortable" providing personal information to online merchants that do not post a privacy policy or privacy seal on their site.

"Love may be blind, but it need not be foolish," said Fran Maier, president and executive director of TRUSTe.  "There's nothing romantic about worries over spam or identity theft.  Consumers are telling online retailers that if they want their business, they better assure them that their privacy is protected."

Further analysis reveals that distrust increases with the age of the shopper.  For example, 70 percent of 18-24 year olds said they are not comfortable providing personal information to sites that do not post a privacy policy or seal.  This percentage increased to 88 percent among shoppers aged 55 and over.

Complete results of the 2004 Valentine's Day Survey are available upon request.

About BizRate.com
Founded in 1996, BizRate.com is the largest, fastest, and most accurate shopping search engines on the Web. With an index of over 30 million product offers from more than 40,000 stores, BizRate.com uses ShopRank™, a proprietary shopping search algorithm, to produce the industry's most relevant search results by weighing price, popularity, and availability of products against the reputations of merchants that sell them. At the heart of ShopRank™ are BizRate.com's signature merchant and product ratings, collected from more than one million online buyers each month, making them the most reliable ratings on the Web. Every week, the BizRate.com shopping search engine prepares millions of shoppers to make smarter, more confident purchases and sends them directly to the checkout page of thousands of online merchants.

About TRUSTe
TRUSTe is an independent, nonprofit organization dedicated to enabling individuals and organizations to establish trusting relationships based on respect for personal identity and information in the evolving networked world.

Founded in 1997, TRUSTe runs an award-winning global privacy certification and seal program. Its seal programs are considered Safe Harbors for the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) and the EU Safe Harbor Framework. Today, TRUSTe maintains the largest privacy seal program with more than 1,400 Web sites certified throughout the world including AOL, Microsoft, IBM, Nationwide and The New York Times. TRUSTe's mission extends standards, certification and oversight into email with Bonded Sender and wireless with the Wireless Advisory Committee. For more information on TRUSTe please visit www.truste.org.

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