Alongside the Postal Service, Verizon this week was awarded the title of one of the "Most Trusted Companies for Privacy" by the Ponemon Institute and TRUSTe. Verizon is the second most trusted company, according to a survey of 6,486 adults, and an "an expert review panel at the Ponemon Institute" which judged the companies on a "rigorous" list of criteria that included the clarity and readability of privacy statements, policy change notice, access to account information, cookie management, and data sharing practices.

It's not clear precisely what kind of value privacy surveys deliver outside of a nice PR boost for companies, given most consumers have been shown to be utterly clueless about how their data is shared. ISPs have quietly been selling your browsing data without your consent for years. Even with the increased public, Congressional and media attention paid to behavioral advertising, most people remain unaware of the practice of clickstream sales.

Verizon's privacy award comes despite a tumultuous few years for Verizon's data and privacy policies. The company was of course at the forefront of debate over Verizon and AT&T's participation in the government's warrantless wiretapping program, in which they voluntarily handed customer voice and Internet data over wholesale to the government without a warrant or transparent Judicial oversight.

In February, Verizon had their wrist slapped for using VoIP number port requests to win back already canceled customers. In March there was an Internet-wide freak out session after somebody simply bothered to read Verizon's policy statement and noticed the company freely shares user data with "affiliates, agents and parent companies." The ongoing criticism recently culminated in a one-man protest in Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg's front yard.

Verizon's response was to put a new PR coat of paint on their privacy practices with one hand -- while working to erode the creation of new privacy protection laws with the other. The telco spent much of 2009 trying to convince lawmakers the industry should instead only have to follow a voluntary code of conduct written by carriers, and that public shame will keep them honest about privacy issues. That's unlikely, given the average user's grasp of privacy issues, and a technology media that's easily distracted by gadgetry and minutiae.

The awards seem more about grading a company's ability to massage this (lack of) public perception, rather than actually grading a company's treatment of personal data, in which case Verizon certainly does deserve an award. eBay, like Verizon, was recently at the center of a controversy involving Skype filtering keywords and logging conversations in China. That didn't stop eBay from grabbing the top spot in the TrustE and Ponemon rankings. Facebook, home of one of the biggest privacy controversies in recent memory, ranked number 10.

Clearly, somebody needs to rank the online privacy ranking organizations.