Consumers read, misunderstand privacy policies.

Though Web sites regularly collect information on visitors, many Americans oven those who claim to understand Web site privacy policies--erroneously believe that sites with privacy policies will not share that information with other sites or companies, according to a new study by the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania.

As many as 57 percent of the 1,200 American adults interviewed reported that they believed that when a Web site has a privacy policy, "it will not share their personal information with other websites end companies," the study concludes. And while almost half of those surveyed said that privacy policies are easy to understand, 66 percent of these respondents "also believe (incorrectly) that sites with a privacy policy won't share data."

The study also shows that Internet users are conflicted about how much faith to put in the government to solve privacy problems. While only 13 percent trust the government not to disclose personal information without permission, more than 80 percent would like to see laws implemented that force Web sites to have a standard format to help protect personal information. Standards that make it easier to understand privacy policies already exist; however, they are not widely implemented. The Platform for Privacy Preferences (P3P), which allows privacy policies to be read by standard Web browsers so that users can see whether a site's privacy practices match their personal preferences, has been in existence for more than a year. However, recent research by AT&T Labs indicates that only 9 percent of sites have P3P enabled, with adoption rates highest for the most popular Web sites.

The researchers scanned 5,856 Web sites policies and found that 538 were P3P enabled. According to the study, many of the P3P policies contained syntactic and other technical errors that prevented the policies from being properly evaluated. The researchers concluded that the study "highlights the need for site administrators to validate their P3P policies and keep them up to date," and they promised to study these errors in more detail in later research.

* The Annenberg report, American and Online Privacy: The System is Broken, and the Alert Labs study, An Analysis of P3P Deployment on Commercial, Government, and Children's Web Sites as of May 2003, are at SM Online.