Further to recent discussions about cookie legislation a small group have
expressed interest in working together in identifying best practices for
institutional policies and practices. One comment that was made was the
need for privacy audits across departmental Web servers. This made me
realise that it would be useful to have easy access to privacy policies
across UK HEIs in order to help identify patterns of usage.
I have used the Delicious tags privacy-uk-heis and privacy-uk-russell-group
to bookmark the privacy pages which I could find for the 20 Russell Group
Universities - see
http://www.delicious.com/lisbk/privacy-uk-heis
It did occur to me that others could use similar tags to bookmark links to
their own privacy pages (with agreement on tags for other groups - eg.
Privacy-uk-1994-group). However I then thought that a public editable
Google Spreadsheet might provide a better alternative.
The spreadsheet is available at:
https://spreadsheets0.google.com/spreadsheet/pub?hl=en_US&hl=en_US&key=0Aqyj
J9Eviy8idG9kT3dGOXpXaUl6dWdUTEFNeFN0WUE&output=html
Note this contains links to Privacy policies which were easily findable from
the home page (i.e.via a link labelled 'Privacy' or 'Legal').
In terms of patterns of usage, Privacy policies did not seem easy to find
for 5 institutions (note this may not be a problem as I suspect people don't
read such information - I'm not making any judgments). Also Cambridge
provided links to departmental servers (no doubt reflecting their
distraibuted environment). A number of privacy policies exploicitly
mentioned Google Analytics - so there may may some form of words which could
be agree on across the sector for this application. However I only noticed
this after I'd gone through the sites so didn't record this information. It
occurs to me that it might be useful to flag such key patterns. I've added a
column for explicit mentions of GA but havren't added any data.
I hope you will provdie details for your own institution so that we will
have a resource available across the sector.
Thanks
Brian
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Brian Kelly, UKOLN, University of Bath, BATH, UK, BA 2 7AY
Email: [log in to unmask]
Blog: http://ukwebfocus.wordpress.com/
Twitter: @briankelly and @ukwebfocus
Phone: +44 1225 383943
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