Online Privacy Policies Meaningless If No One Reads Them
from the what-about-EULAs? dept
In a can-of-worms style legal ruling, a judge has dismissed a case against Northwest Airlines concerning how they treated customer info. It's already well known that many web surfers ignore privacy policies or simply assume that, if there's any privacy policy, their info must be safe. However, in this case, the judge ruled that Northwest did not violate its privacy policy in giving out customer info, because there was no evidence anyone actually read the privacy policy! In other words, even if a company has a privacy policy, it doesn't matter, because no one will read it at all. While this (rightfully so) worries many consumer advocates who are now pushing for federal privacy laws, it also opens up other possibilities. Almost no one reads software end user license agreements. In fact, that's one of the reasons why adware is so common - because companies hide the fact that they're installing all sorts of junk on your computer in the EULA. However, if you took this particular ruling and applied it to the EULA, you could conceivably claim that no EULA is valid, because there's no evidence anyone read it either. In the meantime, though, this ruling really just confirms what most people already knew in the first place: most privacy policies are completely meaningless. The only difference is they used to just be meaningless to the company and now they're meaningless under law as well.
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bad decision
The joke is that for practical purposes there's no enforcement of privacy policies anyway.
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No Subject Given
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