Mari Frank Interviews Fran Maier, CEO of TRUSTe

Fran Maier is the CEO of TRUSTe, the leading brand in online privacy. Fran brings 15+ years of experience building consumer brands and enhancing consumer trust. She is known for her expertise in online privacy, online marketing best practices, and marketing to women. As a co-founder of Match.com she established credibility, safety and trust in online dating, making Match.com the favorite dating site for single women. In executive marketing roles at Women.com and Kmart's BlueLight.com subsidiary Fran has both established new start-up online brands and brought blue-chip offline brands onto the Internet. Since Fran joined TRUSTe in 2001, the company has evolved to expand consumer choice from Web sites to downloadable software. Under Maier's leadership TRUSTe launched new trust services for businesses starting with development of the Sender Score Certified Program, formerly called the Bonded Sender Program, which is widely viewed as the leading legitimate sender program on the market. TRUSTe's latest network reputation service is the Trusted Download Program, which promotes ethical behavior by adware and other software companies by publishing a "whitelist" of certified applications. It is the first downloadable software standards program backed by industry leaders Yahoo! Search Marketing, CNET's Download.com, CA, AOL, and Verizon. During that time TRUSTe has strengthened its monitoring and dispute resolution platforms while growing in influence and certifying more than 2,000 websites. Fran speaks widely on the issues of privacy, security, and trust, has appeared before the Federal Trade Commission and the US Department of Commerce, and has testified before the United States House of Representative's Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade, and Consumer Protection. Fran holds a BA and MBA from Stanford University.