Take a look at that privacy policy
Before you enter your name, address, or anything else on that form, STOP! Wait. Don’t enter anything yet. If you do, you may be giving personal information to strangers, and you know what her mom said about talking to strangers.
Okay, back up a minute. He wants to buy a new necklace for his wife at that great dot com he recently found. They first require you to fill out a form: her name, address, phone number, and credit card information. They also want your email address, gender, and income range.
So do you know these people? Think about it for a minute. How many of your friends (even your best ones) have you told your real age or how much money you make? Have you disclosed your credit card details to your co-workers? Maybe you give your social security number to the guy at McDonalds?
I don’t believe it. So why do you insist on giving this data to a faceless computer? You have no idea who is on the other side of the screen, but every day you provide information that you would never dream of telling your parents or best friends.
Before typing in the information, look around the site until you find a link called “privacy.” It’s usually at the bottom of the home page (at least), and good sites will have a link from EVERY page. Click on the link and read the policy from start to finish. Make sure you understand it: If there’s a word you don’t understand, pull out your handy dictionary and look it up. Once you’re done, read it again. Slowly.
What is so important about this that it requires all this work? Look, you’re giving out personal data about yourself. The website owners have an obligation to inform you how this data will be used.
Questions that any decent privacy policy should answer include:
- How do you get in touch with the owners of the company?
- How do you delete your private data or remove yourself from mailing lists?
- Will they keep your information to themselves or sell it to third parties? If so, can you stop this and how?
- What are they going to do with your credit card details? How do they keep it safe?
- Why do they need the information? For example, our site asks each person who signs up for an award how old they are. Because? Because COPPA does not allow us to collect information from people under the age of 13. How else are you going to make sure you comply with this type of law, except ask?
- It’s very important to fully understand what they plan to do with your email address…after all, you don’t want to be spammed. How do you use cookies?
- Do they make use of your TCP/IP address and other similar information? If so, what is it used for? Virtually every site records this data, but it is rarely used for anything except for bulk statistics and error checking.
- If the site has third-party advertisers, banners, web bugs, banners, etc., what similar information is available about how they use the information? This is most relevant for cookies and TCP/IP data that are automatically logged. At the very least, there should be links to third-party sites so that you can also view their privacy policies.
- Are there special relationships, such as partners, who also use the information? If so, how is that information shared and used? If the website asks for information, how do you ensure that COPPA (a law that tries to ensure that information is not collected from minors without their parents’ permission) is complied with?
- Under what conditions will you receive emails and how can you opt out of receiving them?
Once you fully understand a privacy policy, you can make an intelligent decision about whether or not to provide your information to these people.
I know it sounds like a lot of work, but remember that you don’t know who these people are and you don’t know what they will do with your information. If you read the privacy policy, you can at least understand what they will do with it.
So now, go finish ordering new jewelry for your wife. That is important.
