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At last,
the contents of Aardvark's "million-dollar ideas" notebook
are revealed for all to see!
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Privacy online is a big deal these days.
Ad companies track our movements through a proliferation of cookies, lots
of applications covertly relay information back to HQ via the Net, and
your email address along with your demographic information becomes a currency
all of its own in the right (or should that be "wrong") hands.
So how do you find out who has access to your personal information online
and what they intend to do with it?
First port of call would have to be your ISP.
I took a quick browse around a few of the major NZ ISPs to see if they had
a privacy policy posted and what I found worries me.
Although all NZ-based ISPs will be bound by the Privacy act, I believe it's
still essential that a privacy policy be displayed on the website so as to
make it clear what is covered and what is not.
Here's how the ISPs scored:
- XTRA FAILED
I couldn't find any sign of a privacy policy on the front page and even clicking
on the Terms & Conditions
link revealed nothing related to privacy policy. Only a
search
on the word "privacy" turned up anything
remotely related to privacy -- but that was in the
About Xtra Health section -- huh??
Even if you do have a privacy policy somewhere -- it's
not very easy to find is it?
- ClearNet FAILED
I spent about 15 minutes looking for some sign of a privacy policy on the ClearNet
site and found nothing. I even tried the
Join ClearNet
page in the hope that such an important piece of information would be made
available to people BEFORE they signed up -- but no luck.
However, I wonder if ClearNet are perhaps deliberately hiding their privacy
policy in light of recent changes that I've received several uncomplimentary
comments about?
No sign of a privacy policy on Clear's corporate site
either.
UPDATE: A kind reader pointed me to ClearNet's
privacy policy,
so they do have one -- but why are their no clear and simple links to it from the
front page or another 2nd-level page?
- IHUG PASSED
No sign of a link to the privacy policy on IHUG's front page but there is
a front page link to their
legal policies page
which has a very clear list of policies -- including that important one covering
the privacy of your data.
- Asia Online NZ FAILED
No privacy policy as such -- but the
Terms & Conditions
page does give some vague hints but doesn't really define a policy as such.
- Voyager PASSED
Well Voyager's website is 80% NZoom.com so we'll ignore that bit and focus solely
on Voyager's own bits.
There is a privacy policy
at the foot of the front page. Well done!
What I want to know is, given that many of these ISPs are now acting as
portal sites and attracting users from elsewhere on the Net, why aren't
there clear links to a straightforward statement of the site's privacy
policy?
It seems that some of our large ISPs are incredibly lax -- either appearing
not to have a stated online privacy policy or hiding it away in the back-waters
of their websites.
Just compare this with US-based websites, almost all of which have very clear
and prominently placed privacy policies. It took me less than 10 seconds to
find the privacy policy links on these major US ISP websites:
AOL,
MSN,
Earthlink,
and a host of others.
If your ISP or favourite local content site doesn't have a privacy policy on
their site -- email them and ask why not. But maybe it would pay to use
a free webmail address rather than your primary one -- after all, you have
no idea whether they're going to sell your address to a spammer do you?
Aardvark also makes a summary of this daily column available via XML using
the RSS format. More details can be found
here.
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