06-07-2007

Flexing your privacy muscles

Surfing the Internet has become second nature to many of us, yet it remains a risky endeavor. New support for such fears comes from a study by anti-virus software maker McAfee Inc.  Share personal information on the wrong Web site and you face increased spam, targeted ads and worse.

So why don’t we all do more to protect ourselves? Probably for the same reason many of us don’t exercise enough – it takes effort. But a new study led by Lorrie Cranor, director of the Carnegie Mellon Usable Privacy and Security (CUPS) Lab, shows people will take action – even spend additional money on online purchases – if it is made apparent to them which Web sites have policies that protect privacy and which ones don’t. And if they don't have to expend much effort.

Cranor and her students have developed a shopping search engine called Privacy Finder, that can automatically evaluate a Web site’s privacy policies and display the results in the form of colored boxes on the search results page. It takes no effort on the customer’s part other than to conduct the search using Privacy Finder. The catch: it only works for Web sites that have encoded their privacy policies in a machine-readable form and only about one out of five online merchants now do so. But it’s progress. Now, could they do something to make stomach crunches easier?

Byron Spice