Commentary

Are Privacy Policies Deceptive?

Are privacy policies that begin by telling you how much they care about your information before going to explain much further down how they actually share your data all over deceptive? The Annenberg School’s Joseph Turow says the privacy policies of companies like Amazon and Pandora, which have sophisticated recommendation systems, fall into that category. The point is, nobody reads policies all the way through to see just how widely their data is shared.

The FTC’s Christopher Olsen says privacy policies contain many statements, some of which may be contradictory, but that the agency focuses mainly on a company’s privacy settings when it reviews policies. In that vein, Facebook ran into trouble when it changed its privacy settings so people share more data by default.

 

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