|
So you know these people? Think
about it for a minute. How many of your friends (even your best ones) have you
told your true age or how much money you make. Have you divulged your credit
card data to your co-workers at work? Perhaps you give your social security
number to the kid at the McDonalds?
I didn't think so. Then why do
you insist on giving this data to a faceless computer? You don't have any idea
who is on the other side of the screen - yet every day you give away 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 named "privacy". Usually
it is on the bottom of the home page (at least), and good sites will have a link
to it from EVERY page. Click on the link and read the policy from start to
finish. Make sure you understand it - if there are any words you do not
understand pull out your handy dictionary and check them out. Once you are done,
read it again. Slowly.
What's so important about this
that it requires all this work? Look, you are giving out personal data about
yourself. The web site owners have an obligation to inform you how this data is
going to be used.
Questions that should be
answered by any decent privacy policy include:
- How do you get in contact with
the owners of the company?
- How do you erase your private
data or remove yourself from mailing lists?
- Are they going to 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 data? 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
their age. Why? Because the COPPA law does not allow us to collect information
from people under 13 years old. How else are you going to ensure you are in
compliance with this kind of law except to ask?
- It's very important to totally
understand what they plan to do with your email address ... you don't want to
get spam, after all. How do they use cookies?
- Do they make use of your
TCP/IP address and other similar information, and if so what is it used for?
Virtually every site logs this data, but rarely is it used for anything except
mass statistics and error checking.
- If the site has third party
advertisers, banners, web bugs, banners and so on, what similar information is
available for how they use any information? This is most pertinent for cookies
and TCP/IP data that is automatically logged. At the very least, their should be
links to third party sites so you can look at their privacy policies also.
- Are there any special
relationships such as partners who use the information also? If so, how is that
information shared and used? If the web site asks for information, how do they
ensure that COPPA (a law which attempts to ensure that information is not
gathered from minors without their parents permission) is adhered to.
- Under what conditions will you
receive mailings and how do you opt- in and out of them.
Once you fully understand a
privacy policy you can make an intelligent decision as to whether or not you
want to give these people your information.
I know it seems like a lot of
work, but remember 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's important.
|
