Every year the Online Trust Alliance (OTA), a global non-profit that works to enhance online trust across the entire ecosystem, recognizes companies that have gone to great lengths to protect users’ privacy and identity from abuse and exploitation. This year they have recognized Twitter and given them a very high ranking on their Online Trust Scorecard.

Twitter has been added to the OTA’s Members Honor Role for 2012. This recognition signifies that Twitter is a company that its users can trust to go above and beyond to secure their private information. The OTA examines several aspects of internet business in their decision-making and scoring process.

Take a look at some aspects of their technical and policy measures used for evaluation:

* EV Certs. Think of Extended Validation certificates as the Verified Profile for websites. They help web users know they’re on the real site and not an impostor or spoof site. Take a look at your browser bar when you visit twitter.com. See that green highlight? That’s the way you know you are on the real Twitter site. Always look for this when surfing to twitter.com.

* Always-On HTTPS. Take another look at the browser bar. That “s” after the “http” means we’ve turned on encryption between the web browser and Twitter. This makes it more difficult for third party attackers to eavesdrop on your activity.

* Email Authentication. Similar to what EV certs provide to websites, email authentication enables ISPs and Inbox providers to verify that messages from a sender are indeed from the that sender. We include email authentication on all email we send so that ISPs can be certain they are genuine Twitter messages. We’re very pleased to receive this recognition from the OTA. You can find out more about implementing OTA trust and security measures in this resource section.

So you can put your mind at ease, at least to some degree, there is an organization committed to promoting online trust and internet best practices. Thanks Online Trust Association for watching out for us, and thank you Twitter for being a good sport.