An Examination of Privacy Policies of Global University Web Sites

Due to demand in online services, universities throughout the world are increasing the content of their Web sites and adding features, such as online applications and e-learning. However, adding online services requires that personal data is kept within computerized systems, thus putting personal private information at risk. Online consumers express concern about the risk of their personal private data and demand to know how organizations will protect their records. It is imperative that firms have mechanisms to guard their data and publish protection information within online privacy policies to mitigate user distrust. However, although industry privacy groups may recommend better protection and some countries may legislate its use; this is not universal in all university sites. This study analyzes 90 universities site throughout the world to determine the use of privacy protection. The results show a lack of use of certain privacy mechanisms. The research suggests methods for improving protection

Readability of Privacy Policies of Healthcare Websites

Health-related personal information is very privacy-sensitive. Online privacy policies inform Website users about the ways their personal information is gathered, processed and stored. In the light of increasing privacy concerns, privacy policies seem to be an important mechanism for increasing customer loyalty. However, in practice, consumers only rarely read privacy policies, possibly due to the common assumption that policies are hard to read. By designing and implementing an automated extraction and readability analysis toolset, we present the first study that provides empirical evidence on readability of over 5,000 privacy policies of health websites and over 1,000 privacy policies of top e-commerce sites. Our results confirm the difficulty of reading current privacy policies. We further show that health websites\u27 policies are more readable than top e-commerce ones, but policies of non-commercial health websites are worse readable than commercial ones. Our study also provides a solid policy text corpus for further research

PriCL: Creating a Precedent A Framework for Reasoning about Privacy Case Law

We introduce PriCL: the first framework for expressing and automatically reasoning about privacy case law by means of precedent. PriCL is parametric in an underlying logic for expressing world properties, and provides support for court decisions, their justification, the circumstances in which the justification applies as well as court hierarchies. Moreover, the framework offers a tight connection between privacy case law and the notion of norms that underlies existing rule-based privacy research. In terms of automation, we identify the major reasoning tasks for privacy cases such as deducing legal permissions or extracting norms. For solving these tasks, we provide generic algorithms that have particularly efficient realizations within an expressive underlying logic. Finally, we derive a definition of deducibility based on legal concepts and subsequently propose an equivalent characterization in terms of logic satisfiability.Comment: Extended versio

Mobile Game Players’ Behavioral Intention to Use Facial Recognition Login System in Shanghai, China

Purpose: This research was designed to study the influences of perceived effectiveness of privacy policy, perceived privacy risk, perceived privacy self-efficacy, privacy concern, perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, and the behavioral intention of mobile game players toward facial recognition login systems. Research design, data, and methodology: This research has applied a quantitative method to distribute questionnaires to mobile game players (n=701) in Shanghai, China. The sample techniques involve judgmental and convenience sampling. The index of item-objective congruence (IOC) and pilot test were employed before the data collection. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), and structural equation model (SEM) were implemented to analyze the data and test the overall model along with the proposed research hypotheses. Result: The analysis showed that perceived effectiveness of privacy policy, perceived privacy risk, perceived privacy self-efficacy, privacy concern, perceived usefulness, and perceived ease of use significantly impact behavioral intention. Privacy concern has the strongest impact on behavioral intention. Conclusion: Mobile game services need to provide a comprehensive and reliable privacy policy statement to reduce users’ privacy concerns. For the system, promoters need to emphasize how facial recognition login systems is safer and more convenient than the other sign-in system

Proactive Privacy Practices In The Trend Of Ubiquitous Services: An Integrative Social Contracts Perspective

Privacy is a strategic issue that deserves great attention from enterprises because the convergence of customer information and advanced technologies that they engage in diverse business processes in response to competitive pressure, particularly when businesses promote their traditional e-services to ubiquitous services (u-services). The underlying vision of u-services is to overcome spatial and temporal boundaries in traditional services, such as m-services and e-services. U-services will be the next wave and can be recognized as a logical extension of traditional e-services because u-services are initiated by e-services based on current potential customer pool and further propagated by m-services. In the context of u-services, customers are always connected seamlessly in context-awareness networks so that a higher degree of customized and personalized services can be timely provided. While people are served with more convenience and efficiency, they may also well be aware of privacy threats behind that. Hence, privacy concerns have been recognized as a critical impediment for boosting u-services. Drawing upon integrative social contracts theory, this study undertakes to explore a proactive privacy practices framework that embraces technical and non-technical elements such as human, legal, and economic relevant perspectives. The results of this study are expected to shed light on privacy practices

PRIVACY GOVERNANCE ONLINE: PRIVACY POLICY PRACTICES ON NEW ZEALAND WEBSITES

Addressing privacy issues and concerns are important for organisations when interacting with online customers, and customers are increasingly demanding better transparency about how their personal information could be collected and used. Many organisations are informing users about their privacy practices through an online privacy notice, policy or statement. These privacy notices should reflect the privacy governance practices of the website owners as such notices are the only way online customers can be informed about the privacy practices of the organisation. This study presents a definition of privacy governance, and discusses what good governance would be in the online context. The online privacy practices of organisations in New Zealand are examined using a content analysis questionnaire, with the aim to further understand how organisations in New Zealand through their websites are informing users about their privacy practices, and whether privacy practices of the organizations align with the privacy laws set by the New Zealand government. It was found that while many New Zealand organisations are posting privacy notices, many are failing to provide a good indication of their privacy governance by omitting best practices and legislative requirements

DOES THE AUGMENTATION OF SERVICE LEVEL AGREEMENTS AFFECT USER DECISIONS IN CLOUD ADOPTION SCENARIOS? – AN EXPERIMENTAL APPROACH

Despite the benefits of cloud computing, customers are reluctant to use cloud services as they have concerns about data security and privacy. Many of these concerns arise due to the lack of transparen-cy. Consequently, bridging the existing information asymmetry and, thus, fostering trust in the cloud provider is of high relevance. As service level agreements are an important trust building factor and due to their technical and complex nature, the augmentation of these is promising. Therefore, we in-vestigate the effects of augmenting service level agreements (by means of augmented browsing) on the ease of the information gathering process and simultaneously on perceived information overload, comprehension and transparency in a web-based experiment. The results of our online experiment do not confirm our assumed positive effects of augmentation. Nonetheless, we show that the ease of gath-ering information about a cloud service positively influences the perceived trustworthiness. Further-more, we demonstrate that the perceived trustworthiness of a cloud computing provider largely deter-mines the intention to use its services. Thus, besides improving security, cloud providers not only have to communicate trust-critical information but also have to identify suitable measures of information provisioning that considerably improve transparency while lowering information overload