Online privacy policies may not only be difficult to find but nonexistent, according to Penn State researchers who crawled millions of websites and found that only one-third of online organizations made their privacy policy available for review.

“Privacy Lost and Found: An Investigation at Scale of Web Privacy Policy Availability,” a paper authored by students and faculty from the Penn State College of Information Sciences and Technology (IST), detailed an analysis of the online privacy policy landscape and studied the unavailability of privacy policies on company domains.

…“Not many websites have privacy policies,” Srinath said. “For a user landing on a random website, there is only a 34% chance that a privacy policy exists. Among them, there is a 2% to 3% chance that the link is broken. And 5% of the links that do work will lead to a page that contains irrelevant information, such as placeholder text or documents in a language that doesn’t match the website’s landing page.”

Read more:

Fetzer, M. (2023, October 26). Most websites do not publish privacy policies, researchers say. Penn State News. https://www.psu.edu/news/information-sciences-and-technology/story/most-websites-do-not-publish-privacy-policies-researchers/