Customer data privacy and protection is a serious matter. When recording and managing third parties data, when accepting credit cards in payment, it's the responsability of the web site owner to guarantee the privacy and the security of the customer's and visitor's data.
Whatever the area, the customers and visitors data privacy and confidentiality protection is a must. A reliable web site owner must consider his visitors, customers, partners or suppliers responsively. Obviously he must not sell or disclose the customer's data in any way.
Customer's and visitor's data privacy involves ethics and technical knowledge. There is a European regulation and various countries have enforced specific measures. The W3C issued a recommendation about the use of cookies. The data privacy issue implies data protection against intrusion and any kind of piracy.
p3p privacy policy and online data privacy
The p3p privacy policy conforms to the p3p 1.0 recommendation issues by the W3C, the World Wide Web Consortium. p3p stands for The Platform for Privacy Preferences Project (P3P). It is supposed to cover the use of personal information on Web sites you visit but is limited to the use of cookies.
Apart from the server side, it's possible to protect online data privacy on the client side. Browser technology such as Opera enable a good online privacy protection. Thrid party software may help to protect online privacy: firewall and antivirus technology or dedicated software.
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Sources about security and privacy protection issues
About some of the concerns of privacy, see the reports and books presented
by the http://www.cyber-rights.org/
UK Association
the headlines and sections of the
http://www.privacyinternational.org/
UK organisation.
- EPIC, Electronic Privacy Information Center, dedicates a significant portal of links to the resources and tools related to privacy protection, under the title "Online Guide to Privacy Tools", English.
- http://www.epic.org/privacy/tools.html
- http://www.epic.org/privacy/privacy_resources_faq.html
- Figer.com publishes an interesting article about "Security and privacy on Internet"
- http://www.figer.com/publications/securite_et_vie_privee.htm, French.
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Data privacy regulation
Information excerpted from our policy:
Following the spirit of the British and European laws, a web site owner must not sell nor give to any third party any data received from their visitors or customers. Any person or organisation who gave its address or any other data may at any time require access, modification or deletion of its data.
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European Union
Within the European Union, the processing of data of a personal nature is governed by the European directive 95/46/CE of October 24, 1995 from the European Parliament and Council, which targets the protection of data belonging to physical people for the processing of personal data and the free circulation of these data. Some European countries require a declaration from the web site processing the data, in particular: the UK Privacy Act and the Belgium require that the name of person who is responsible be declared to the Commissioner and published. France requires that the Web site be declared to the CNIL, a publicly controlled commission.
The European Union
Directive is available at the EC web site
The UK Information's
Commissioner website
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United States
The United states and Canada have adopted, on their own, a slightly different framework, the Safe Harbor Principles http://www.export.gov/safeharbor/, which relies upon the principle of a voluntary adhesion and is not so strict than the European framework for data communication to third parties.
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