A Content Analysis of Governmental and Private Enterprise Website Privacy Policies

This paper explores the differences between privacy policies on governmental and private enterprise websites. Three industries, healthcare, financial, and political, were selected for comparison. The six policies that were analyzed include regulations.gov, Facebook, healthcare.gov, Blue Cross Blue Shield, The U.S. Office of Personnel Management and Fidelity Investments. These sites were chosen because users may share similar information when interacting with site services. The content analysis was performed to determine if there were significant differences in policy content and coverage. Although there were no obvious differences when policies were examined at a surface level, a close reading revealed that policy coverage and content was not the same. The policies were further analyzed to show how they discuss cookies, the ways in which a user could opt out of data collection, information sharing with third parties, and the often blurred lines between involuntary and voluntary information collection present. The results of the analysis revealed that governmental websites often have policies that provide more detailed and comprehensive information about user choice and policy coverage.Master of Science in Library Scienc

A Hierarchical Multitier Approach for Privacy Policies in e-Government Environments

The appeal of e-Government users to retain control over their personal information, while making use of advanced governmental electronic services through interconnected and interoperable deployments, can be assisted by the incorporation of privacy policy and Preferences documents. This paper addresses the formulation of light-weight and accurate privacy policies, while preserving compliance with underlying legal and regulatory framework. Through the exploitation of existing governmental hierarchies, a multitier approach is proposed able to support diverge data needs and processing requests imposed by service providers. The incorporation of this approach into e-Government environments will reduce the administrative workload, imposed by the inclusion of privacy policy documents, and promote the implementation and provision of user-centric and data privacy aware electronic services