Privacy Labelling
Following my posts about Security Labelling, the effect of Location and Trust .UK, I read about an early draft of proposed privacy labelling icons.
Privacy policies can be a nightmare and some bright people got together to discuss ideas and this lead to a workshop in London earlier this year.
Well, there are now some suggestions for privacy icons which would help users understand the purposes of use, with whom it is shared and how long it is kept for. These could complement well written privacy notices.
Many of the issues with the proposal are discussed in the project's blog posts and associated comments. The largest obstacles I see are where different "policies" apply to different user roles and mis-labelling by site owners, even if they participate. In the former, customer data may be held for longer than other visitor data, and employee data may be help for decades (and may be required by law). All sites will want "good labels" and it might be easy to say the privacy labels apply to some users/some processes, and yet not label the other uses. The definition of "intended use" is also open to interpretation — an issue currently being discussed by the US Federal Trade Commission. However, I think this is a great initiative and encourage you to get involved.
On a related topic, remember the UK ICO's consultation on its draft Data Sharing Code of Practice closes tomorrow.
Posted on: 04 January 2011 at 09:35 hrs
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