Category Archives: Website Disclosure

Developer Alert: Time to choose between a free privacy policy or $2,500 fine

Posted on December 4, 2012 by Jim Brock

Ars Technica reports today that the California Attorney General is now actively enforcing state law requirements that your app must have a privacy policy if it transmits personal data about California residents. The fines are steep: up to $2,500 per … Continue reading →

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Personal data matching: New tracking method in Trackerlist

Posted on September 27, 2012 by Jim Brock

PrivacyChoice Trackerlist is a motherlode of information about data and privacy practices across the global marketing industry. We now index well over 1,000 tracking companies, programmatically monitoring and updating privacy policy summaries, choice processes, oversight practices and a host of … Continue reading →

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FTC: It’s not just about your privacy policy

Posted on August 9, 2012 by Jim Brock

Google just agreed to pay a $22.5 million fine to resolve an FTC action over Google’s circumvention of the Safari browser’s privacy settings. While the substance of the complaint is particularly important for ad networks, there’s a critical reminder for … Continue reading →

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13 Takeaways from the Federal Trade Commission’s final privacy report

Posted on March 27, 2012 by Jim Brock

After two years of study, the Federal Trade Commission has issued their final report, Protecting Consumer Privacy in an Era of Rapid Change. Here are the takeaways that I found most significant (particularly #13!): Companies can establish a “safe harbor” … Continue reading →

Posted in Best Practices, Do Not Track, Legislation, mobile, Privacy Policies, privacyscore, Pros, Self-Regulation, Website Disclosure | 1 Comment

Making privacy measurable (and easier) with privacyscores

Posted on February 12, 2012 by Jim Brock

Today we launched our most important and ambitious project: privacyscore.com. In it we are applying analytic methods to measure privacy risk across more than a thousand websites. We’re doing it to help solve a big problem for web users: how … Continue reading →

Posted in Best Practices, Privacy Policies, privacyscore, Pros, Self-Regulation, Website Disclosure | 4 Comments

The browser you use may be the biggest privacy decision you make

Posted on September 22, 2011 by Jim Brock

That’s one reason why we’re so pleased to participate in the Online Trust Alliance initiative to encourage users to upgrade their browser, as announced today. Given the significant privacy improvements in the latest generation of browsers, it’s an important time … Continue reading →

Posted in Best Practices, Firefox, Folks, Microsoft, Pros, Website Disclosure | Leave a comment

Can better privacy disclosure be crowd-sourced?

Posted on May 26, 2011 by Jim Brock

Last week I opened up our project to develop summaries of key privacy policies for the top websites. Today I added a whole new dimension to the project:  You. To speed our own review of policies in the hundred or … Continue reading →

Posted in Pros, Website Disclosure | 2 Comments

Building a taxonomy of privacy policies: What we have learned so far from the Privacy Summary Project

Posted on May 19, 2011 by Jim Brock

Much of the effort in the PrivacyChoice Project focuses on “third-party” privacy, or how nearly 400 tracking companies collect and use information across websites. Lately we have been working on “first party” privacy too — how individual websites directly collect … Continue reading →

Posted in Privacy Policies, Pros, Website Disclosure | 1 Comment

What we know (and what we don’t)

Posted on January 12, 2011 by Jim Brock

The last few months have been eventful for those following ad targeting and consumer privacy. Here’s my list of things that we have now learned (and some we haven’t) about the emerging “self-regulatory” framework. Read full article at adotas

Posted in Best Practices, DAA, Do Not Track, Google, Microsoft, Oversight, Pros, Website Disclosure | Leave a comment

When are search queries “behavioral data” (and why does it matter)?

Posted on January 6, 2011 by Jim Brock

This very thoughtful post by Jonathan Mendez makes the point that publishers are sitting on piles of underutilized intent data, including search queries that are passed to a destination website when a user clicks on a search engine result. Mendez’ … Continue reading →

Posted in Folks, Google, Pros, Website Disclosure | 1 Comment