Privacy Policies Only as Good as the People Enforcing Them

Techdirt is reporting that while we all know privacy policies may not matter much in the grand scheme of things, a recent study shows that it may be even worse than originally surmised. It seems that the real issue is with who has access to personal data and what they are able to do with it. "of course, it's not just the people reading the policies that don't seem to understand them -- it's those in charge of living up to and enforcing the policies. A new study surveyed a bunch of executives, including both marketing execs and those in charge of enforcing the privacy policy, and quickly discovered that marketers have a very different concept of 'privacy' than privacy officers. Not surprisingly, they don't see anything wrong with sharing all sorts of data that seems to horrify privacy officers."

Comments

s/News/Not News/

[Lord Grey]

The article links to TechDirt but the actual article is at Forbes:

What Privacy Policy?

Survey statistics from the real article:

More specifically, 80% of marketers said their organizations share e-mail addresses with third parties, compared with 47% of security and privacy officers. Other examples: 65% of marketers said they would distribute a customer's cellphone number, while only 47% of privacy execs said their companies allowed the data to be shared. Forty-five percent of marketers believe their companies shared credit card data, compared with 32% of privacy officers, and 29% of marketers believe their firms distribute social security numbers, compared with 7% of privacy professionals.

Those numbers just back up what we all believed anyway, right? I mean, is this really news? Or just news with different numbers?

Re:Any policy...

[Bearpaw]

True, although it's worth noting that the enforcement of the US Constitution is ultimately the responsibility of US citizens.