10
Overall, the Popular websites are more privacy protective than the Random websites. In some cases we were not able to determine if a site
gathered particular data or engaged in a particular practice, and thus coded it as “unclear.” Some practices were never unclear, while others were unclear
as much as 76 of the time. In our analysis, if a site did not explicitly mention a particular practice or was unclear about it, we assumed they did
not engage in that practice. Therefore, we may be undercounting the number of sites that should receive “red bird” warnings at each setting.
3.2 Previous Studies
The 2006 Privacy Policy Trends Report is our first in a series of annual summaries. We designed our research to allow us to compare our results to
prior studies. The Federal Trade Commission FTC started annual privacy policy
surveys starting in 1998. Privacy policies surveys have been an important tool for informing public policy debate on protecting privacy. For example, the
FTC conducted “web sweeps” in 1998 and 2000 by surveying privacy policies posted online.
29
The Federal Reserve System and several other agencies surveyed privacy practices posted by financial institutions in 1999.
30
Finally, Milne and Culnan’s work combines previous surveys. Their longitudinal
analysis of 1998 – 2001 privacy policies takes into account issues from different protocols used over the years, and normalizes them to allow direct
comparison between the surveys.
31
The rest of this section contrasts our findings in 2006 to the normalized findings from the Milne and Culnan study. Note that while we
followed similar protocols our results have not been normalized and therefore may not be directly comparable. We offer this comparison to give an idea of
general trends over time.
Note that because the web surveys collected different data over the years, in some cases data is unavailable.
11
1999 2000
2001 2006
Number of sites surveyed
n = 286 n = 281
n = 223 n = 100
Privacy policy 48.3
65.8 76.7
88 Provides notice about
what personal information is collected
49.7 71.2
73.5 100
Provides notice about disclosure to third
parties 40.6
NA NA
83
Provides access 27.6
21.4 NA
94
Table 2: Comparison of privacy practices between random sample groups
1998 1999
2000 2001
2006 Number of sites
surveyed n = 105
n = 91 n = 87
n = 71 n = 75
Privacy policy 44.8
84.6 96.6
98.6 96
Provides notice about what personal
information is collected NA
73.6 90.8
95.8 100
Provides notice about disclosure to third
parties 58.1
71.4 NA
NA 80
Provides access 26.7
41.8 49.4
NA 95
Table 3: Comparison of privacy practices between popular sample groups
3.3 Analysis of Privacy Protections
