It seems that nearly every privacy statement somebody sends me doesn’t actually protect my privacy. They start out saying all sorts of great things, like<\/p>\n
Company X is committed to maintaining the privacy of its customers. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n
After the section listing what information they collect, there’s the section describing who they will disclose it to. <\/p>\n
We do not share non-public personal information with outside parties except as permitted by law… <\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Oh, gee, thanks. Your policy is not to do anything illegal. And you need a privacy statement for this? <\/p>\n
Actually, it’s worse, The full sentence goes like this: <\/p>\n
We do not share non-public personal information with outside parties except as permitted by law or as is necessary to service customer accounts. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Notice the “or” rather than the “and”. That means that they reserve the right to violate the law<\/i> if it is necessary to provide service to a customer. <\/p>\n
And then, if they haven’t already promised to protect nothing, they throw this in: <\/p>\n
Additionally, except as prohibited by law, we may disclose non-public personal information to companies that perform marketing services on our behalf or to other institutions with whom we have joint marketing agreements. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Translation: We will sell your personal information to other companies for marketing purposes to the maximum extent permitted by law. <\/p>\n
But that’s okay, because they restate their commitment to privacy in a final italicized paragraph. <\/p>\n
Protecting the confidentiality of your non-public personal information remains a priority for us, and is one way in which we respond to the trust you have placed in our organization.<\/i> <\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Because if you put it in italics, you really really mean it. Even if the other stuff contradicts it. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It seems that nearly every privacy statement somebody sends me doesn’t actually protect my privacy. They start out saying all sorts of great things, like Company X is committed to maintaining the privacy of its customers. After the section listing what information they collect, there’s the section describing who they will disclose it to. We do […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1069,"featured_media":111744,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[103,137],"class_list":["post-18143","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oldnewthing","tag-non-computer","tag-reading-the-fine-print"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"
It seems that nearly every privacy statement somebody sends me doesn’t actually protect my privacy. They start out saying all sorts of great things, like Company X is committed to maintaining the privacy of its customers. After the section listing what information they collect, there’s the section describing who they will disclose it to. We do […]<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18143","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1069"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18143"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18143\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18143"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18143"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18143"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}