Privacy Policies Only as Good as the People Enforcing Them

Techdirt is reporting that while we all know privacy policies may not matter much in the grand scheme of things, a recent study shows that it may be even worse than originally surmised. It seems that the real issue is with who has access to personal data and what they are able to do with it. "of course, it's not just the people reading the policies that don't seem to understand them -- it's those in charge of living up to and enforcing the policies. A new study surveyed a bunch of executives, including both marketing execs and those in charge of enforcing the privacy policy, and quickly discovered that marketers have a very different concept of 'privacy' than privacy officers. Not surprisingly, they don't see anything wrong with sharing all sorts of data that seems to horrify privacy officers."

s/News/Not News/

[Lord Grey]

The article links to TechDirt but the actual article is at Forbes:

What Privacy Policy? [forbes.com]

Survey statistics from the real article:

More specifically, 80% of marketers said their organizations share e-mail addresses with third parties, compared with 47% of security and privacy officers. Other examples: 65% of marketers said they would distribute a customer's cellphone number, while only 47% of privacy execs said their companies allowed the data to be shared. Forty-five percent of marketers believe their companies shared credit card data, compared with 32% of privacy officers, and 29% of marketers believe their firms distribute social security numbers, compared with 7% of privacy professionals.

Those numbers just back up what we all believed anyway, right? I mean, is this really news? Or just news with different numbers?

wow!

[xpuppykickerx]

i hope they didn't spend too much money figuring this out.

Re:Any policy...

[Bearpaw]

True, although it's worth noting that the enforcement of the US Constitution is ultimately the responsibility of US citizens.

Re:Ameritrade

[bcrowell]

I am an AMTD customer. Can you please explain this transfer in a little more details to spare me from doing the research?
Well, let's say you're going to switch to scottrade, which is what I did. Basically all you do is call up scottrade and tell them what you want to do. They'll guide you through the process of transferring your positions from ameritrade to them -- they're motivated to help you complete the process, because they want you as a customer. It was pretty easy when I did it. The only minor hassle was that small amounts of money ($5 and $10 amounts) kept showing up in my ameritrade account for a while from dividends from the stocks I'd had in that account before, and I had to talk to ameritrade to get that money sent to me (couldn't have them write me a check by the normal mechanism, because I no longer had a functioning account). Although the experience with Ameritrade was annoying, the whole thing did kind of work out well in a way, because Ameritrade gave me a certain number of free trades when I opened my account, whereas Scottrade would have charged me $7 a trade. So I got all my positions established for free, and then transferred them to a brokerage that wasn't so incredibly clueless about security and running a w3c-standards-compliant web site.