Analyzing the Privacy Policy: Responses and Challenges.: A survey research about the experiences from common users and service providers?

The main purpose of this thesis is to investigate how different age categories of users and the service provider s point of view about understandability, technicality, importance and awareness of privacy policy. The emerging ambiguity in information security has raised many privacy and trust issues that are context dependent. Therefore there are several uncertainties and risks seen today concerning theprivacy policy & subscriber trust. It is a responsibility of services providers before amending their policy to notify their subscribers. Because if they do not take this initiative then it creates trust deficit for their subscribers and this affects their business and goodwill.In this work we have adopted the online survey questionnaire technique to perform a research based on the user s ideas and thoughts about the privacy policy and security issues. We have used the same technique with different questions based on the organization s own perspectives on the privacy policy. This would highlight to what extent an organization thinks the policy fulfills the user s confidence. We have decided to target Norwegian service providers and people as participants for this survey, to better understand the theme of research. It took about four months to collect the responses from the organizations and from the participants. This report discusses the importance of privacy policy for a common user / subscriber. Generally observed in this work is that, before accepting privacy policy, it is hard to read these policies and understood by end-user, and taking this prospect ahead, many privacy policies and regulations have a difficult context to understand.This survey methodology was selected to ensure the originality of the user`s state of mind, and it was also vital for the service providers to show their responses and opinion on privacy policy. We have noticed that a majority of the users are not interested in reading the contents of the privacy, and they simply provide their sensitive information without ensuring the authenticity and regulations inside theprivacy policy. Furthermore, we observed that users think privacy policy just saves them from viruses and threats, and there is a chance of phishing if it is not mentioned on the service provider website. Most of the service providers have recently introduced the privacy protection seals for secure data transmission on their website in order to build a strong subscriber`s trust.Finally, it is important to continue researching to get better tools and more mechanisms for a good security policy, and to establish guidelines for better understanding as we learn more.Keywords: Privacy; Personal information; Service providers; Subscriber`s; Policy; Issues; Survey design; Legislation; Settings; Practices