Take for example two sites, one that use a non-tracking version for its various social media sharing buttons vs another that uses the highly invasive ones that track you everywhere. In most cases, the average user has no idea that one site, one company etc made a conscious choice to respect the privacy of its users.
Heck, if Apple can spend $MM on an ad campaign that just says "Privacy.", then there might even be an actual business model buried in this, just as Google Page Rank etc helped the SEO industry. Imagine a point in the not so distant future where people prefer a site that has the A+ Privacy badge.
I wish I had a better example here. I work in SEO, yet loathe the industry at the same time.
My skepticism is based on questions like:
How is the presence of tracking determined? It can be hard to detect tracking when done by the site itself, and even harder to determine if that site allows access to the data it has collected.
Will people pay any attention? The web is full of various badges and certifications (mostly around security), and I expect that most people are blind to them now. Would they notice a new one? And if they did, would they consider it actually meaningful?
How would the badge-granting process minimize the gaming of the system. You work in SEO, so you know very well how such things can be gamed.
I have a number of other such questions, but I think those are the big ones.
I’m guessing the website would be regularly monitored. What if they implement some VW emissions cheat style to pretend they track less than they really do