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Your Personal Information is Private, Unless We Need to Sell It

posted by janrinok on Tuesday June 30 2015, @05:15PM   
from the you-mean-sombody-hadn't-realised? dept.

tt0265459 writes:

The New York Times published an article on Sunday confirming what we've all assumed — that internet privacy policies are so full of loopholes as to be meaningless. They found that of the 100 top alexa-ranked english-language websites, 85 had privacy policies that permitted them to disclose users' personal information in cases of mergers, bankruptcy, asset sales and other business transactions.

When sites and apps get acquired or go bankrupt, the consumer data they have amassed may be among the companies' most valuable assets. And that has created an incentive for some online services to collect vast databases on people without giving them the power to decide which companies, or industries, may end up with their information.

"In effect, there's a race to the bottom as companies make representations that are weak and provide little actual privacy protection to consumers," said Marc Rotenberg, the executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a nonprofit research center in Washington.

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Original Submission

• Re:It didn't take a NYT article to convince me Re:It didn't take a NYT article to convince me (Score: 3, Interesting) by maxwell demon on Tuesday June 30 2015, @08:55PM

  by maxwell demon (1608) on Tuesday June 30 2015, @08:55PM (#203506) Journal

  If anyone was really surprised by anything in the NYT article, well, you're a moron.

  Actually I was surprised to find this in the article:

  (The privacy policy of The New York Times says that, in the event of a business transaction, consumers’ information may be included among transferred assets. It does not promise to notify users if such a situation were ever to occur.)

  No, I was not surprised that these terms are there. I was surprised that the article — which, after all, is published in the New York Times — contains that information.

  --
  The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.

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  Starting Score:	1		point
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• Re:It didn't take a NYT article to convince me (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 30 2015, @09:55PM

  by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 30 2015, @09:55PM (#203523)

  > I was surprised that the article — which, after all, is published in the New York Times — contains that information.

  I would have been surprised if it was not mentioned in the article. Real journalism has rules about disclosing conflicts of interest and writing an article about industry practices when you are in the industry is an obvious conflict of interest. That's the kind of things you won't see from bloggers - except in very narrow cases where the FTC has made it illegal not to disclose.

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