EPIC REPORT - "Surfer Beware: Personal Privacy and the Internet" - The Diigo Meta page

• 05 Jul 14
  

  fergyton
• 03 Nov 13
  

  Nathan Wyble

  privacy DGL Vocab

  • We checked whether sites collected personal information, had established privacy policies, made use of cookies, and allowed people to visit without disclosing their actual identity. We found that few web sites today have explicit privacy policies (only 17 of our sample) and none of the top 100 web sites meet basic standards for privacy protection. However, anonymity continues to play an important role in online privacy, with many sites allowing users to access web services without disclosing personal data. EPIC recommends that sites continue to support anonymity while developing policies and practices to protect information privacy.

  • The protection of privacy is one of the most important issues on the Internet today. Internet users routinely report that privacy protection is one of their greatest concerns. More Internet sites are collecting personal information from users through online registrations, surveys, and forms. Information is also collected from users surreptitiously with "cookies." Web users are understandably concerned about the potential loss of privacy.

      

    We set out to determine what privacy policies and practices were actually in place on the most popular web sites today. We were interested in determining when personal information was being collected. We wanted to see if web sites had explicit privacy policies and how good those policies were. We were curious if sites made it possible for individuals to view their own information collected at the site. We checked to see if users could visit a site anonymously. We also wanted to look at the use of cookies.

  • By avoiding the collection of personal information, web sites encourage users to visit sites. In the physical world, we note that very few stores require the collection of personal information before allowing someone to enter.

      

    We suspect that preserving anonymity may be the easiest way to protect on-line privacy.
  • In the absence of meaningful privacy policies, net surfers today also have little assurance that personal information that is provided at a web site might not be misused. Not surprisingly, many users are reluctant to disclose personal information and some provide false information when asked.
  • Techniques to provide users with more information about privacy practices, such as eTRUST and other similar branding techniques, should be encouraged. These services should provide clear and meaningful designations for privacy practices. They should also be backed up with regular auditing. We also have doubts about proposed techniques, such as P3, that require users to disclose privacy preferences. We think that good privacy policies should provide meaningful information for users about web site practices and not require users to disclose personal information. Many users are also likely to consider their privacy preferences to be, well, private.

  3 more annotations...

• 15 Mar 12
  

  Charlotte Guindon

  • We were next interested in trying to determine how many web sites actually had privacy policies. Our first conclusion was that finding a privacy policy is not an easy task. We tried a number of different techniques to locate privacy policies.

      
     
    • We looked at the home page for the term "privacy" with the Find command in the browser software 
    • We searched the FAQ page for the site for the term "privacy" 
    • We looked at the legal terms and conditions page for the site for the term "privacy" 
    • We looked at the customer agreement and similar pages at the site for the term "privacy" 
        

     There are other search methods we might have tried, such as running a search engine with the domain name and the word "privacy," but this seemed to us to be beyond the call of duty. We felt that users should be able to locate privacy policies quickly and easily and that a privacy notice should be clear and conspicuous. 

     

     We excluded privacy policies that were posted to a web site that were actually internal privacy policies for a company and its employees. 

     

     We found that only 17 of the sites that we visited actually had privacy policies, and few were easy to find. 

      
• 28 Sep 10
  

  Kacee Craig

  for post week 3

  privacy

• 29 Feb 08
  

  wesmills

  privacy research

  • SURFER BEWARE:
      PERSONAL PRIVACY AND THE INTERNET

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