Great article, Rick. Personally, I'm wondering more about how to get companies on board. Correct me if I'm wrong, but making it work would require 1) developing the labels themselves; 2) developing standards for both human assessment and machine-readability; 3) getting companies to conform to these standards; 4) getting browsers to include them; 5) getting users to care.

To have any hope of widespread adoption, the companies (at least a sort of a critical mass of them) would probably want to have a say on every step. They would probably either want to agree among themselves on what the standard should be, or you could play off their instinct to seem better than the rest of the pack. In the first case, you may as well forget about the whole thing. In the second case, there's no real incentive for those who know their privacy standards are not great to join at all.

-- MislavMataija - 03 May 2009