FTC Hears Debate About Whether Privacy Polices Can Work
By Wendy Davis
You might not expect consumer advocates to laud a major bank these days, but Chase has done at least one thing that privacy expert Chris Hoofnagle finds praiseworthy: The company came up with a clear way to inform checking account customers that they will lose their overdraft protection unless they opt in.
Speaking at the Federal Trade Commission's roundtable discussion about online privacy, Hoofnagle, a lecturer at the UC Berkeley law school, noted that Chase's document includes passages in red ink that tell consumers in no uncertain terms that debit card transactions will be denied if they don't have money in their account, unless they sign up for overdraft protection.
"We don't see privacy notices that say anything that clearly or that urgently," Hoofnagle said....
Consider, a recent study by Berkeley School of Information [2009 master's project "KnowPrivacy"] found that most privacy policies of the 50 top Web sites were filled with loopholes. Among others, the policies "contained unclear statements (or lacked any statement) about data retention, purchase of data about users from other sources, or the fate of user data in the event of a company merger or bankruptcy."