Online Privacy Policy of the Thirty Dow Jones Corporations: Compliance with FTC Fair Information Practice Principles and Readability Assessment

摘要

Privacy policy in corporation’s business refers to a statement or a legal document that discloses some or all of the ways a party gathers, uses, discloses and manages a customer or clientu27s personal data such as name, age, address, gender, email, etc. (“Privacy Policy,” 2012). In 1998, the United States Federal Trade Commission (FTC) reported a study of online privacy concerns to Congress, which described a widely-accepted Fair Information Practice Principles (FIPs) of Notice, Choice, Access, and Security (Landesberg, Levin, Curtin, u26 Lev, 1998). This project conducted a statistical study by examining the FIPs compliance for each Dow Jones Corporation’s (DJC’s) online privacy policy. In addition, a study by George Milne, Mary Culnan, and Henry Greene showed that online privacy had grown in length as well as had declined in readability (Milne, Culnan, u26 Greene, 2006). Therefore, this research assessed also the readability of DJC’s online privacy policy by measuring widely adopted Flesch Reading Ease Score (FRES) and Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level (FKGL). Furthermore, in order to better understand the practical situations regarding privacy concerns and policy readability from a customer’s point of view, a customer survey was given to business students at the College of Business and Public Administration at California State University, San Bernardino.