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

What other areas does this apply to?

[RabidMoose]

I, for one, would seriously like to see a survey conducted across a wide ranges of job types and industries, polling employees about how compotent they feel they are at their job. I get the feeling a rather large number of people are just desk-fillers, who happened to be able get through the interview process, only to realize they have no idea what they're doing. And the same people have bosses who are just as incompotent, so everybody keeps their job.

Most privacy policies are worthless anyway.

[Ken D]

Seriously. Google the phrase "except as allowed by law", you will find tons of privacy policies that look like this "BlahCo does not share your data except as allowed by law".

Oh great! They won't break the law. That's comforting. Thanks for spending money telling me how you won't do anything to break the law. You'll just distribute my info to anyone to whom it is legal to do so.

How about "BlahCo will not share your data except as REQUIRED by law." Oh no, that would stop their marketing efforts....

Re:Most privacy policies are worthless anyway.

[swm]

A few years ago, congress passed a law requiring companies to disclose their privacy policies to their customers. That's when we started getting those dense little privacy notices stuffed into our credit card bills and splashed onto web signup pages.

Someone went through and *read* one of those things (from a major brand, I forget who) and worked out the actual content of it. What it came down to was

"If you don't check the box [on the signup page], we will do whatever we like with your personal information.

"If you do check the box, we will do whatever we like with your personal information, but we won't break the law."

Some companies, such as Deniro just plain lie.

[www.sorehands.com]

There are some companies, that just plain lie. In one such instance, Deniro Marketing, they were provided a unique e-mail address, and now that e-mail address is getting spam for drugs, enhancement products, stock tips, etc.

I have had other companies (versuslaw.com) try to claim that "you must have been infected with a virus that distributed your address book." Of course, I run OS/2 and Post Road Mailer. Nobody writes virii for OS/2 and Post Road Mailer does not run scripts or anything else. Of course, I had another company blame it on their fulfillment people.

Gotta Love the Double Standard . . .

[The Angry Mick]

. . . in this little gem from the Forbes article:

Ponemon notes that despite their differences, the two groups [marketeers and privacy officials] tend to agree about the privacy value of another kind of information: their own. Ninety-three percent of marketers and 99% of privacy officers surveyed said their own privacy was "an important personal issue."

Translation:

"I don't give a shit about my customer's privacy, but nobody better ever fuck with mine.

Ameritrade

[bcrowell]

A classic example of this is Ameritrade.

1. http://bbs.spamgourmet.com/viewtopic.php?t=81&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=45&sid=21389b26d00d7c69bc59424a299b3f98
2. http://groups.google.com.fj/group/news.admin.net-abuse.email/browse_thread/thread/de64222d0929c6b4/a402bc49558f7330

I set up an account with them, using a single-purpose email address, amtdcrowell06 at lightandmatter.com. Notice the amtd on the front, which was a unique prefix I chose just for use with them. I started getting spam like crazy. Strangely enough, the spam was all about stocks -- pump-and-dump stuff. Ameritrade tried to blame it on a virus, which wasn't very plausible, since I was running FreeBSD, postfix, and mutt. They tried to blame it on a brute force or dictionary attack, which also wasn't very plausible -- the prefix doesn't really consist of dictionary words, and 13 characters, consisting of a mixture of letters and digits, gives a total of 10^20 possible addresses that would have had to be checked by brute force. I wouldn't have minded if it was a myspace account or something, but these were people who had large amounts of my money. I migrated my account to scottrade. Years later the news broke that ameritrade had leaked tons of email addresses. They blamed it on some unknown insider. Since people had been telling them about the problem for years, you'd think they'd have clued in a lot earlier. It's amazing how bad an internet-based company can be at the internet thing. If any slashdotters are using ameritrade, you might want to think about switching to some other company. (Ameritrade's web interface also had some functionality that didn't work properly in Firefox on Linux.) You can transfer your portfolio from one company to another without having to pay capital gains, and without incurring transaction costs.