Privacy Statements as a Means of Uncertainty Reduction in WWW Interactions - End User Computing Challenges and Technologies: Emerging Tools and Applications - page 201

sponding positive assertions” (Fairclough, 2001,
p. 128). When companies commit themselves, for
example, to not selling or renting customer data,
they implicitly contest the charge that they do. It
thus seems that companies employ negations to
raise the level of certainty and to dispel users'
fears about privacy infringements.

the sharing of PII, suggesting that a privacy seal
is no guarantee that Web sites do not infringe
upon user privacy.
The study also has shown that privacy poli-
cies may not always tell readers what they want
to know. As mentioned earlier, when coding the
privacy policies, no answers were found for about
one-third of all questions, either because the is-
sues were not addressed in the privacy policies
or because the information provided was not
sufficient to answer the questions posed, thus
leaving readers in the unknown as to whether a
certain practice is carried out or not. Table 7 shows
a breakdown of all unanswerable questions into
the four coding categories, including only those
24 questions referring to specific data handling
practices (codes 12 through 35, Appendix B).
Comparing the results for seal companies and
those for the total sample, it becomes evident that
the disclosures of seal companies are slightly more
comprehensive than those of the total sample,
leaving fewer questions unanswered in all four
categories. Third-party data collection is evidently
an issue not dealt with sufficiently in privacy
policies of both non-seal companies (48.39%)
and seal companies (47.37%). The results for data
sharing are considerably better for seal companies
(27.63%) than for non-seal companies (43.55%)
but still rank second in terms of unanswerable
questions, followed by data collection. Unsolicited
marketing communications, in turn, are well ad-
dressed in the privacy policies examined, although
it has to be taken into consideration that only one
code dealt with this issue.

disCussion and impliCations

discussion of Findings

Companies admit to data handling practices that
disrespect user privacy, such as sharing e-mail
addresses with third parties (12%), sharing per-
sonally identifiable information with affiliates
(42%) or third parties (6%), forcing users to accept
cookies to be able to shop at a site (17.1%), selling
customer data (2%), sending unsolicited e-mails
without opt-out facilities (14%), and allowing data
collection by third parties who are not required to
sign privacy agreements (44.12%). It also seems
that some companies use sweepstakes as loopholes
to obtain customer data that are not subject to the
company's general privacy principles and, thus,
may be shared or sold (18%). These findings
suggest that users' privacy concerns outlined
in the literature review are well founded, given
that companies admit to the very practices about
which consumers are concerned. The comparison
of the total sample and the seal companies has
shown that the latter also engage in questionable
practices, such as third-party data collection or

Table 7. Breakdown of questions not addressed