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

Abstract

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 client's 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, & 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, & 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.