Melbourne - Survey finds very few Australian corporate and consumer web sites have privacy policies. Some large and popular web sites actually have non-privacy policies. According to a 1998 BusinessWeek survey, privacy was found to be the number one consumer issue facing the Internet - of more concern than cost, ease of use, security, or spam.
Some people believe that concerns about lack of privacy are slowing the growth of e-commerce.
And some of these privacy statements could more correctly be described as non-privacy policies. Eighty eight percent of sites did not mention anything about what they would do with any information collected from users. Online privacy concerns are real and need to be addressed. Whilst some of these conditions may be designed to protect the company from breach of copyright suits by people claiming to have given them commercial ideas over the Internet, there is no mention of the exclusion of personal information. And a good privacy policy should provide contact details for exactly who to contact to opt out.