Analysis of the privacy policies of most visited Web sites

Privacy issues are a significant obstacle to the spread of online commerce. Even though many companies have privacy policies on their web sites, few people read them because they are long and difficult to understand. As a result, users expect companies to treat their personal information in certain ways but often those expectations do not match the actual policies and conflicts arise. Therefore, both users and companies would benefit if privacy concerns were addressed.; This thesis gives an overview of privacy online. It outlines how information is collected, why it is collected, and how people feel about sharing their information online. In addition, U.S. federal laws and regulations affecting online privacy are given along with some high profile cases involving online privacy. This research also examines the differences between how users expect companies to handle their personal information and what the privacy policies actually say. Both the written privacy policies and the more compact P3P computerized policies are examined for the top 100 most visited web sites in the U.S. Differences in privacy policies among different types of web sites were identified. In addition, some sites had differences between their plain text privacy policy and their compact P3P policy (which should be consistent). The belief is that the findings will help to improve the understanding of issues surrounding online privacy and help organizations develop privacy policies that better meet their customer's needs and expectations.