"Most Websites Do Not Publish Privacy Policies, Researchers Say"
According to researchers at the Pennsylvania State University who crawled millions of websites, online privacy policies may not only be difficult to find but also nonexistent. They discovered that only one-third of online organizations made their privacy policies available for review. The paper titled "Privacy Lost and Found: An Investigation at Scale of Web Privacy Policy Availability," written by students and faculty from the Penn State College of Information Sciences and Technology (IST), discussed the lack of privacy policies on company domains and provided an analysis of the online privacy policy landscape. Mukund Srinath, lead author of the paper, explains that privacy policies are legal documents organizations use to disclose how they collect, analyze, share, and secure their online users' personal data. Srinath emphasizes that privacy policies are often the only source of information concerning what is done to users' personal information online. The availability of privacy policies and users' ability to understand them are essential for ensuring people can make informed decisions regarding their personal information. This article continues to discuss the study on web privacy policy availability.
Submitted by grigby1