What issues are there?

Companies and individuals are gathering information about you, your friends and family, your surfing habits, your banking information, without your permission or knowledge. These are often ad agencies eager to gather demographic information for their clients about your preferences or surfing habits. They do this via sneaky techniques they include in email or on their web sites. Legitimate sites first ask for your permission or allow you to “opt-in” before they start gathering information about you or setting cookies. Legitimate sites also have a straight forward privacy policy published that clearly describes how they will use the information they gather. This should not be couched in legalese that confuses rather than clarifies.

There are, however, some positive reasons for gathering information from visitors to a web site. Cookies can memorize information you enter one time on a form to save future typing. They can also remember your product preferences and allow you to obtain targeted ads if you choose (or often even if you don’t). Providing your email address can allow you to opt-in to newsletters that can be emailed to you on a regular basis.

Some legislative and regulatory agencies are beginning to address the potential  invasions of privacy some of these information gatherers use, especially the covert methods, and some legal remedies may be appearing in the near future, including nationwide spam opt-out lists and criminal penalties for false or misleading methods to obtain information about you.
 

Methods used for information gathering

• Forms that visitors fill in - Orders, Enrollment
• Bulletin Boards
• Guest Books
• Opt-in Newsletters
• “Email Us” buttons
• Cookies
• Trojan Horses disguised as harmless screensavers, media viewers, or free programs that can be downloaded
   

Web Fin’s Stance

Web Fin won’t support or participate any type of development that includes any unauthorized snooping into site visitors’ personal information. We won’t gather email addresses unless they are voluntarily provided by site visitors for a legitimate purpose that is thoroughly explained to those visitors whose information is collected prior to its gathering. This will normally be done via a clearly stated Privacy Policy. We will only program your site to accept cookies if they are to be used for legitimate purposes that have been explained clearly to the user, such as remembering order information or shopping cart items. Under no circumstances will we create Trojan Horse programs or spyware for you. You’ll have to find a programmer who has gone over to the dark side to create that type of site for you.
 

Privacy Policies

Privacy policies tell your site visitors what you will do with the information they provide to you. This often includes selling the information to other companies who use it to send you uninvited Spam, junk mail, or telemarketing calls. The more malevolent types purchase or exchange personal information to use in identity theft. Others are just plain nosey. By law, an organization that gathers personal information from you must tell you how they intend to use that information in their Privacy Policy, which must be published. Needless to say, if visitors were aware of some of these more nefarious uses of the information they provide, they would never reveal personal information to a web site. So the uses get couched in pages and pages of legalese that serve to hide the true intent of these type of people. Faced with a long treatise to read at each ssite they visit, most users (4 out of 5 according to recent research) neglect to read a site’s Privacy Policy, enabling the site owner to basically use the information they collect as they wish.

Web Fin thinks this is misleading at best and in some case downright deceitful, if not illegal.  We strongly recommend our clients be very reluctant to share any information they collect and, if they do choose to share it with others, do it in an a respectable way and to state that in a short and clear statement in their Privacy Policy . We will refuse to participate in any information gathering that is in conflict with these guidelines
 

Cookies

So you want people keeping lists of the Internet sites you visit regularly? That's exactly what happens when commercial Web sites upload  "cookies" to your computer's hard drive.

Cookies are small data packets that contain information about your Web-surfing habits, which are then made available to cookie-savvy sites on the Internet. The main use of cookies is to track demographics for advertising agencies that want to see just what kinds of consumers a certain site is attracting. Some web sites also use cookies to keep your account information  up-to-date. That way, when you enter a site where you have an account,  Amazon.com for instance, the site knows immediately who you are and loads your  personal preferences. This also how sites like Yahoo! offer "myYahoo!" personalization features.

Companies like Double-Click and NetGravity use cookies to compile information  about Web surfers, which in turn is used by advertising clients to deliver targeted ads. You can see a prime example of this strategy at the popular search engine Yahoo!, which displays a seemingly random banner ad when you first  contact the site. After you've entered a word search, for example "books for  sale," the banner ad suddenly starts touting Amazon.com