A related issue is of particular concern on advocacy sites. Similarly, for all portal sites, the question of breadth arises. Finally, political portals threaten democratic practice with poorly defined and articulated privacy policies. Privacy is used here very broadly, and concerns any and all information collected by a site for internal or external use. We are not concerned here only with information that can be tied to a specific individual.
Privacy policies ought to be explicit and complete.
In addition to the problems of transparency, the opaque, commercially driven models of dot-com political portals present problems of access to the new commons of the Internet. If certain candidates, parties, and ideologies are always presented at the expense of others due to supposed commercial viability, and if the public is unaware of this selection process, some of the most promising features of the Internet for engaging new political interest and activism will be thwarted. Rather than bemoan the shortcomings of the commercial model, we raise the question of how the political portal model can be used to further the positive development of Internet-based democracy. The answers may lie in the database structures that underlie the portals themselves. It is helpful to disaggregate the political portal and take a look at its component parts.