George R. Milne & Mary Culnan
In the U.S., Congress has had a long-standing interest in consumer
privacy and the extent to which company practices are based on fair information
practices. Previously, public policy was largely informed by anecdotal evidence
about the effectiveness of industry self-regulatory programs. However, the
Internet has made it possible to unobtrusively sample Web sites and their
privacy disclosures in a way that is not feasible in the offline world. Beginning
in 1998, the Federal Trade Commission relied upon a series of three surveys
of Web sites to assess whether organizations post online privacy disclosures
and whether these disclosures represent the U.S. definition of fair information
practices. While each year's survey has provided an important snapshot of
U.S. Web site practices, there has been no longitudinal analysis of the multi-year
trends. This study compares a subset of equivalent individual level Web site
data for the 1998, 1999, 2000 and 2001 Web surveys. Implications for using
this type of research to inform public policy are discussed.