Abstract Recommender systems have become a central component of e-commerce, delivering personalized and efficient shopping experiences that streamline product discovery, enhance decision-making, and increase customer satisfaction. Their effectiveness depends on the quality and availability of user data, which requires users to trust the system’s ability to handle personal information responsibly. Prior research has shown a limited effect of generic privacy policies on creating user trust in the system and on users’ willingness to share personal information. Building on the Web Trust Model, we conducted an online experiment examining the effect of differently framed privacy policy statements, targeting the beliefs of competence, benevolence, or integrity of a recommender system, on trust in the system as well as willingness to follow recommendations and to share information with the system. The results showed that neither the presence of a privacy statement nor the specific emphasis on trust components (competence, benevolence, integrity) in a privacy statement significantly increased users’ trust in the system, their willingness to rely on its recommendations, or their willingness to share information with the system. These findings suggest that privacy policy statements alone, even when explicitly designed to signal trustworthiness, are unlikely to serve as effective mechanisms for fostering trust in recommender systems.