Of fifty US Senate websites, only about fifty percent have a comprehensive privacy policy. Now, in a week when it is revealed that Facebook’s privacy policy has more words than the US constitution is it any wonder that Americans are not so keen to trust e-government sites?

According to a Senior Lecturer in Computing Joanne Kuzma of the University of Worcester, UK, who received her PhD in Information Systems from Nova Southeastern University in Florida, considerable progress has been made in the types of electronic services offered by the US government and members of the Senate in recent years. There are numerous advantages to e-government (accessibility and the digital divide aside), but it seems that the people running the najority of those Senate websites yet have a lot to learn about gaining trust and ensuring that privacy concerns are addressed properly.

“Studies have shown that US consumers are very concerned about their privacy and personal information protection when they visit websites,” says Kuzma, “so it makes sense for site owners to judiciously handle consumer personal data with a high level of protection.” There are countless voluntary guidelines on design, trust, and privacy but there is also various pieces of legislation in place that affect privacy requirements, that are simply not being met across all sites.

Kuzma’s detailed assessment of fifty Senate websites reveals that the majority have inadequate privacy policies and many are actually breaking the law by not complying with legislation. “Many of the sites do not even have basic safeguards, such as lack of a privacy policy link on their site,” she says. There are four principles to which all websites, e-government or otherwise, should stick, points out Kuzm, one might call these the SCAN principles:

• Security – Sites should take reasonable steps to protect consumer’s personal information.
• Choice – Consumers should be offered a choice on how their information is used.
• Access – Consumers should be reasonable access to their personal information and correct inaccuracies.
• Notice – Consumers should be provided clear notice of information practices, information collection, and how sites use information.

Of course, no one wants an e-government website’s privacy policy to be more complicated than that of the social networking site Facebook. Indeed, some observers have suggested that the Facebook policy is deliberately convoluted and difficult to understand simply because that will tame users by obfuscating what the site owners are really doing with your personal data and privacy. Surely, such translucent (as opposed to entirely opaque or transparent approach) is not one that the US government has adopted…surely…

Joanne Kuzma (2010). An examination of privacy policies of US Government Senate websites Electronic Government, An International Journal, 7 (3), 270-280

NYT source on bloat of Facebook privacy versus US constitution.

Joanne Kuzma