Interpretation and Analysis of Privacy Policies of Websites in India

Privacy policy is vital and legal document that allows websites/companies to communicate users on how data is gathered, the ways of collection, its purpose, and its management. Once user accepts it, the user approves the disclosure of his/her personal/behavioral data to websites under the conditions specified in the policy document. So, ideally the privacy policies should be readable and provide sufficient information to empower users to make knowledgeable decisions. Thus, we have examined more than 50 privacy policies and discussed the content analysis in this paper. We discovered that the policies are not only unstructured but also described in complicated language. Our analysis shows that the user data security measures are nonspecific and unsatisfactory in 57% privacy policies. In spite of huge amount of information collection, the privacy policies does not have clear description on information collection methods, purpose, sharing entities names and data transit. In this study, the 11 % privacy policies are compliance with privacy standards which denotes other privacy policies are less committed to support transparency, choice, and accountability in the process of information collection and its use.