Towards a Web Privacy Benchmark

We have been providing cookie audits for customers for several years now, and we often get asked by clients how their website compares to others.

This is not a particularly easy question to answer objectively – there are a lot of contextual factors to take into account, and there are lots of different things you can measure to make the comparison.

However, is it time to start thinking about a web privacy benchmark?  I think it is, especially when you consider that one of the principles supported by the EU General Data Protection Regulation is the idea of promoting ‘Privacy by Design’.  Bring in the emerging idea of privacy as a competitive advantage, and it starts to make sense to have some kind of objective measure of ‘privacy friendly’ sites and services.