Web Privacy Ratings Questioned
A report rating 30,000 Web sites’ privacy policies has found that sites are improving in their privacy practices. But the San Diego-based group, Eponymous.com, gave two prominent privacy advocacy groups such poor ratings that it has been criticized for its methodology. The report was released Tuesday.
Eponymous found that 69% of sites have a comprehensive privacy policy, an improvement over 1998 when the Federal Trade Commission discovered that only 2% of sites provided such a policy.
Among the top 1,000 most-trafficked sites, Eponymous gave its highest rating, a four, to 8.6% which means these sites “commit to never share personally identifiable information with third parties, nor use such data to contact a user without permission,” according to the report.
But two major privacy advocacy groups–Junkbusters (http://www.junkbusters.com) in Green Brook, NJ, and the Electronic Privacy Information Center (http://www.EPIC.org) in Washington, DC–got lower ratings of two stars. Two stars indicates the site will only share personally identifiable information with third parties with a consumer’s explicit permission, but that the site may contact consumers without permission.
The rating is not an accurate reflection of EPIC’s privacy policy, said David Sobel, general counsel at EPIC. “The rating is more a reflection on the inadequacy of this survey than our privacy policy,” he added. “It’s a simplistic approach.” EPIC does not place cookies, share personal information or contact its newsletter subscribers without their permission, he pointed out.
Network advertising company DoubleClick, whose privacy policies have been looked into by the FTC and five attorneys general, received “two stars like we do,” he said, to illustrate the faults in the rating methodology.
“EPIC’s site is great and it has a great privacy policy,” said Internet privacy expert Paul Schwartz, a professor at Brooklyn Law School. “We want groups that rate Web sites, so consumers will know what sites are good and what sites are bad on the Web. Otherwise, Web surfing is costly and time-consuming.”
Though Enonymous calls its report “the most comprehensive online privacy research to date,” Schwartz said, “there could be a market for rating sites. If it turns out Enonymous is not good, then maybe another company will step in.”
Timothy J. Kane, Eponymous founder and director of privacy, could not be reached by press time. In published reports, he responded to the criticism against the report by saying, “It might be a glitch in our database.”
