Towards secure sealing of privacy policies

Abstract

In order to provide customers with a sense of security regarding the protection of their personal data, companies sign on to a “seal” programme, where rules designed by the seal issuer in accordance to underlying laws must be adhered to. A user can verify online that a specific organisation adheres to a published privacy policy. This paper argues that the verifications means these programmes use are vulnerable to DNS spoofing attacks and present a privacy policy verification (“seal”) scheme, which is not vulnerable to attack. It is also argued that there are disadvantages in operating seal schemes that attempt to publicly certify compliance levels with a self‐regulatory privacy protection model. On the contrary, these disadvantages are softened when used in a regulatory model that has adopted comprehensive laws to ensure privacy protection.