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Informing Consumers
Consumers can't protect their PII if they don't know how it's being used or who is in possession of it. Effective, consumer-friendly privacy policies are easy to locate and offer a wealth of information. They leave readers well-aware of how their information will be treated and shared and where to get questions answered. NYPIRG found a number of online privacy policies with such steel-door features. Unfortunately, we also found Web sites that lack privacy policies altogether, and others with confusing or seemingly contradictory privacy policies.
Screen Door Awards for Leaving Consumers Uninformed
Just as it wouldn’t make sense to trust a screen door to protect household valuables, it would also be a mistake to trust a credit card number or other valuable PII to a company with flimsy privacy practices or an inadequate privacy policy. These screen door awards go to privacy policy features we found to do a poor job of informing consumers about the use of their personal information at the time our survey was conducted. And the awards go to the following anti-consumer privacy policy features...
No Policy Posted/Nonworking Links
With identity theft a major concern and consumers clamoring for greater privacy protection, Web sites that lack privacy policies altogether ought to be a thing of the past. Unfortunately, they are not. Sites with nonworking links are just as bad. In e-commerce, leaving a privacy policy off a Web site may lead potential customers to infer that the company 1) doesn’t have a plan in place to safeguard their PII, or 2) doesn’t want to disclose how they plan on using customer PII. Neither thought is particularly comforting.
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