Permission marketing experts Rosemary Smith and Jenny Moseley lift the veil on privacy notices.

Be honest, do you always read and fully understand privacy notices when you submit your personal data? If the answer is ‘No’ you would not be alone.

Earlier this year, a You Gov poll in the UK revealed that half  of consumers don’t understand what they’re signing up to when they fill in online and paper forms. The survey also uncovered widespread cynicism, with almost half of those questioned believing small print to be purposely designed to be as woolly as possible.

The need for transparency when communicating with consumers about how their data will be used is a recurring topic in advice from European data protection authorities.

Last month, the Italian Garante issued ‘surfer beware’ advice regarding revealing personal data on social and business networking sites. Among dire warnings of how embarrassing personal details and photos might mar a budding career, the advice points the finger at sites that hide terms of use away and allow themselves to make unilateral changes in the way that details are used.

Facebook found that out the hard way when users rebelled and the site had to retreat from personally targeted advertising and failing to allow permanent deletion of accounts. However, sign-up still seems to be possible without reading the privacy policy.

The UK Information Commissioner has also piled in on the issue of privacy notices but, instead of just preaching caution, his office has provided a new code of practice to help data controllers get them right.
Generally, data protection laws prescribe what an individual needs to be told about processing (who, why and what will it lead to) but do not say how that information should be expressed.

Thankfully, the new code offers broad advice rather than specific wording, encouraging plain language and discouraging the use of legalese or jargon. The code makes it clear that there is little point in telling people about obvious uses of their information (fulfilling an order for example) but focuses on making sure that people understand what non-obvious use will be made of their information.

Consumers are urged to empower themselves by paying more attention to privacy notices, but the Information Commissioner also wants all that small print turned into big print!

The debate will continue (not the least in this magazine) about how transparent privacy notices need to be. 
Perhaps one of the first things we should all do is start reading them?