An Exploratory Study on the Measuring of Privacy Policies

With the development of Internet technology, individuals have become increasingly more dependent on the network. Personal information is collected by many firms when people surf online, but information collected is often misused by collectors, which may seriously violated the privacy of consumer. For this reason, a lot of government agencies and international organizations put great emphases on the development of privacy protection regulations. Companies from different parts of the globe have begun to issue privacy policies or statements on their websites, some detailed some simple. It is thus a vital task to evaluate these privacy policies and identify the degree of privacy protection. On the basis of previous studies, this article explores the dimensions of Internet privacy policy from the perspectives of personal information protection. Five dimensions of privacy policies including notice, choice, access, security and enforcement are identified and scale items for each dimensions are also proposed.