Author: Maria Temming / Source: Science News
If you want to know how a website shares your personal data, you might be tempted to slog through its online privacy policy.
Be prepared for disappointment. Website privacy policies explicitly disclose only a fraction of sites’ data-sharing practices, according to new research that casts doubt on whether users can make informed decisions about their online activity.The research, presented April 25 at the Web Conference in Lyon, France, investigated the data-sharing disclosures of more than 200,000 websites — the Arkansas state government homepage, for instance, and the Country Music Association site. In specific, it looked at how these sites shared data with third parties, such as advertisers and data brokers, as well as how those sites described their privacy policies.
For this analysis, privacy researcher Timothy Libert used a software tool called webXray to trace data transmissions from each website to third-party data collectors. Of 1.8 million data transmissions tracked, only 14.8 percent were sent to third parties specifically mentioned in those sites’ privacy policies. The rest of the data went to third parties that users wouldn’t know about even if they read the sites’ policy statements.
Libert also found that data transfers to widely familiar third parties, like Google, Facebook and Twitter, were more likely to be disclosed than transfers to obscure entities.
For instance, while 38.3 percent of data transmissions sent to Google were disclosed, the disclosure rate for the data broker Acxiom was about 0.3 percent.Covert collection
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