New Study Looks at Evolution of Privacy Policies [4/21/2000]

dot-coms, have already spent millions on branding . But it takes even more effort to establish trust and loyalty

With all the attention on privacy concerns, the least these sites can do is be up front about what they do with collected information.

"Companies on the Web are going to collect data; a lot of that data can result in good marketing," says Timothy Kane, founder of privacy policy monitors enonymous.com.
"The question now is 'how can they do this the right way?' "

enonymous.com recently completed a nine-month-long survey. It found that among the most trafficked websites, almost all publish some kind of privacy policy or statement. For example, 47 of the Top 50 PC Data Online sites (as of Feb 2000) do post a privacy
policy. Among non-government sites, enonymous.com revealed that dot-coms have the highest percentage of sites with some kind of privacy policy (24.7 percent), significantly higher than .org (14.4 percent), .net (15.4 percent), and .edu (3.2 percent) sites. This is in sharp contrast to the Federal Trade Commission's report from two years ago that noted
only 2 percent of the top 1,400 sites posted a policy.

enonymous.com also discovered that 77.2 percent of the 30,000 sites it surveyed had no privacy policy. However, many of these sites don't collect visitor data, which is a common reason given for not posting a privacy policy.

"We're not entirely sure what "no policies" means, for a lot of the sites," Kane says. "Many of the 30,000 we surveyed were smaller. We believe they should at least post something that says 'we don't collect data.'"

Consumers are Regaining Control enonymous.com also looked at 7,000 sites that did post privacy policies. Of them, only 34 percent stated that they might sell personally identifiable information without user
permission; many of the policies included phrases like "This site doesn't sell your data, but may do so in the future."

The company also found that aside from the practice of "reserving the right" to change a policy at any time, websites do in fact update and edit their policies regularly. In the nine months since enonymous.com's initial review, some 27 percent of the top 1,000 sites (according to PC Data) changed their privacy policy significantly.

Other Findings
Of the top 1,000 sites, 19.5 percent do not clarify whether they share visitor data.

Forty-four percent of the top 1,000 sites do not clearly specify whether they will contact users.

Of to top 1,000 sites, 116 ask for users' consent to use collected data to contact them and to share with affiliates.

Of 186 permission-driven sites, 116 have a consent mechanism at the point of collection.

This is Just the Beginning enonymous.com claims that most of this study only provides a snapshot of privacy ratings conducted by its analysts.

"All we wanted to show was that things are getting better in relation to privacy policies," Kane says. "We feel this study did that. Ultimately privacy comes down to what you do and not what you say."

To provide even more perspective, enonymous.com says it is undertaking a project called the Privacy Index, which will provide week-by-week data on changes in the privacy policies of the Top 1,000 most-trafficked sites according to PC Data Online.
enonymous.com anticipates having the first release of the Privacy Index in May 2000.
The company says it is able to do this by deploying URL tracking technology which allows its analysts to monitor changes in posted policies of any site in the Index within 24 hours of any change.

Methodology
enonymous.com rates any and all types of websites, including top level domains and others such as .us, .ca, .uk, .au, .jp, etc. The results described here include a look at the company's database that includes 29,260 specific domains.

enonymous.com's 2000 ratings utilized a slightly refined ratings matrix, and revealed quite a few changes in privacy policies since the 1999 review. By using the refined rating matrix, the company was also able to see how many sites engage in particular
practices and what kind of language they use in their policies.

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