Systematic analysis and evaluation of web privacy policies and implementations

In this research work, we introduce the first metric for systematic analysis and evaluation of a website's entire approach to online privacy. Since the user is the ultimate judge of whether privacy was acceptably maintained, our metric views all aspects of the privacy implementation from the perspective of usability. By examining the privacy policy, technical implementation and customizable features and interface from the perspective of usability, our metric identifies modifications to privacy policies and implementations which would improve user privacy outcomes in practice. Our work is motivated by the potential of improved privacy metrics to help organizations systematically identify and implement improvements in their privacy practices and interfaces. We evaluated ten websites using our metric and reveal potential for improvement in all websites as well as contrasts between websites with similar functions, such as social networking, online shopping and information retrieval.