Survey Finds Privacy an Increasing Concern to Consumers

Most Trusted Companies; Survey Finds Privacy an Increasing Concern to Consumers; Google No Longer Among Top 20

(Extracted from The San Francisco Chronicle, December 15, 2008) Facebook, Apple, Yahoo!, Verizon and FedEx for the first time have made an annual ranking of the top 20 most trusted companies in the United States. Google, however, dropped off the list, released today by the Ponemon Institute and TRUSTe in San Francisco, as did Countrywide Financial, Bank of America (which acquired Countrywide) and Weight Watchers. At No. 1, for the fourth year in a row, was American Express, followed by eBay, IBM, Amazon and Johnson & Johnson. This the fifth year the survey has been conducted.

2008 Ranking	2008 Ranking
1 American Express (remained number one)	12 Intuit (+7)
2 eBay (+6)	13 WebMD (-1)
3 IBM (no change)	14 Yahoo! (new to the top 20)
4 Amazon (+1)	15 Facebook (new to the top 20)
5 Johnson & Johnson (+1)	16 Disney (-1)
6 Hewlett Packard (+10)	16 AOL (-12)
6 U.S. Postal Service (+1)	17 Verizon (new to the top 20)
7 Procter & Gamble (+2)	18 FedEx (new to the top 20)
8 Apple (new to the top 20)	19 US Bank (-2)
9 Nationwide (remained the same)	20 Dell (-7)
10 Charles Schwab (-8)	20 eLoan (-9)
11 USAA (+4)

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