Privacy Guides: “They all claim “Your privacy is important to us.” How can we know if that’s true? With privacy washing being normalized by big tech and startups alike, it becomes increasingly difficult to evaluate who we can trust with our personal data. Fortunately, there are red (and green) flags we can look for to help us. If you haven’t heard this term before, privacy washing is the practice of misleadingly, or fraudulently, presenting a product, service, or organization as being trustworthy for data privacy, when in fact it isn’t. Privacy washing isn’t a new trend, but it has become more prominent in recent years, as a strategy to gain trust from progressively more suspicious prospect customers. Unless politicians and regulators start getting much more serious and severe about protecting our privacy rights, this trend is likely to only get worse. In this article, we will examine common indicators of privacy washing, and the “red” and “green” flags we should look for to make better-informed decisions and avoid deception…”