What's Wrong with Online Privacy Policies?

November 12, 2011

What's Wrong with Online Privacy Policies?

            Online privacy policies are used to inform the users of the organization, the policies that the organization has towards the users on how the information of the users is accessed, and to what level. The user has the rights to know about it as well as the organization are more likely to put these information, so that, they inform users of what they can do, and, cannot. Unfortunately, the trend of displaying these policies by the organization has been criticized of being too long, vague, unclear, miss representing, and most importantly, they tend to address the protection of the company against privacy lawsuits that are hardly understood by the general users (Pollach, Irene).

            Customer should always be at the core of any business. Since, businesses are going more online than ever before, the time has come that the business should practice good online policies to inform the users of how their information is being used. This would earn the user’s trust and, encourage the users to participate in online transaction, which could help any business to gain the customers in this competitive market (Pollach, Irene). They should be clear on the factors as how they are handling customer’s data, and if they would be providing information to the third parties.

            The online privacy policy should be written in simple language that could be read even by the people who are not well educated because, study has found that the internet users are not reading online privacy policies since they are more of a legalistic and hard to read (Pollach, Irene). The author of the article, What's Wrong with Online Privacy Policies?, conducted studies with many companies about how the policies would reflect about data handling, and how they describe their data handling practices concerning to data collection, third-party data collection, data storage, data sharing, and market communication (Pollach, Irene).  The studies showed that 39.4% of the questions couldn’t be answered with the policies of many companies, as well as, the data storage that stood out are of insufficient disclosure that needs to be addressed to gain the user trust (Pollach, Irene).

            The language used in writing policies are basically based on linguistics that may be interpreted by a normal user in a different manner, away from reality, or, they would not be able to understand it properly (Pollach, Irene). Therefore, they need to be clear enough for the users to read and understand the policy, by the proper use of lexical choice, syntactical transformation, negation, and modality in language that is used in online privacy policies (Pollach, Irene). Also, presentation  of different types of data and data handling methods in user friendly cells to enable users to decide which parts of the policy they would like to get information on, would definitely help better user experience, leading user satisfaction and company goodwill (Pollach, Irene).

            The article by Irene Pollach, neatly presents the flaws of the general online privacy policies written by most of the companies. The author also proposed the solution and recommendation about the best practices, that would help the customers gain confidence towards online transaction, and, the company creating a goodwill and long term positive results. I completely agree with the authors suggestions and his ideas that the transparent online policies would only help the company to build positive relationships with the customers.

           

Works Cited:

Pollach, Irene. "What's Wrong with Online Privacy Policies?" ACM Digital Library. ACM New York, NY, USA, Sept. 2007. Web. 12 Nov. 2011. <http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1284621.1284627>.