Good paper, Rick. I think there's a few substantial obstacles to community-generated easy to understand privacy icons:

(1)What do the icons communicate? Is the focus a company's actual collection/data use practices, or the privacy protection it binds itself to provide users? The latter could be determined by parsing privacy policies. What data a company actually collects and what it does with it however is mostly guess-work for an outsider.

(2) Who puts together the list? Parsing deliberately misleading privacy policies seems like a task for lawyers, not the general internet community. If EPIC or another public interest organization is to handle the list, how is the project to be funded? Are there any corporate sponsors out there that might benefit from having their competitors' disregard for privacy exposed?

(3) Inaccurate ratings could create liability for the raters. While a default "no protection" icon when the list contains no information about a website might incentivize the company to adopt a standardized policy, it could also be actionable as defamation or tortuous interference if the privacy policy actually does commit that website to some protection.

(4) There's a lot of websites and privacy policies out there. This ties in to (3) and (2). If you need lawyers to put together the list, and you need the information to be accurate, then the best you might be able to accomplish (at least in the short run) is to rate popular websites.

(5) Getting wide-scale adoption. A PrivacyMinder? plugin will only have a substantial impact if a lot of users use it. Firefox is a minority browser still, and if people are as apathetic about privacy as we tend to think, they're not going to go out of their way to install a privacy rating plugin. AdBlock? caught on because it actually makes the web browsing experience more pleasant. If you want PrivacyMinder? to be effective, you probably need to get it bundled into Firefox as a standard feature. How do we do that is the face of opposition from companies that want to collect your data?

-- AndreiVoinigescu - 26 Apr 2009