Many times what happens is that the companies use legal terms that a laymen can not understand unless they happen to have some kind of a background in law. But the thing is that when it comes to privacy policies they actually don’t need to be that complicated. Basically what that means is that regardless of how the privacy policy is written, you as a customer should be able to read and understand all of the terms and conditions that are used. In fact many companies will actually put out two privacy policies. One policy is going to be a very simplified version of their privacy policy, which makes it easier for regular people to understand and the other is going to be the regular privacy policy. It will probably be when you are reading the regular privacy policy that you are going to run into terms that you don’t understand. Some of those terms can be legal terms, but more often than not they are just going to be ordinary terms.
Here is a list of some of the terms that you might run across when reading a company’s privacy policy.
Tracker GIF (Clear GIF) — electronic images that are usually not visible to site visitors that allow a website to count those who have visited that page or to access certain cookies.
Trace route — the course that a packet travels across the internet from on computer to another
Query string — the extended string of a URL after the standard website address. This data begins with a question mark and usually contains the search information requested by the user. The website uses this string to provide the requested information to the user.
Proxy server — a proxy server is a system that caches items from other servers to speed up access. On the web a proxy first attempts to find data locally and if its not there fetches it from the remote server where the data resides permanently.
Privacy seal program — a program that certifies a sites compliance with the standards of privacy protection. Only those sites that comply with the standards are able to note certification
GUID — Acronym for globally unique identifier. This unique code is used to identify a computer, user, file, etc for tracking purposes.
Ad blocker — software placed on a user’s personal computer that prevents advertisements from being displayed on the web. Benefits of an ad blocker include the ability of web pages to load faster and the prevention of user tracking by ad networks
Ad networks — companies that purchase and place banner advertisements on behalf of their clients
Anonymizer — a service that prevents web sites from seeing a user’s internet protocol (IP) address. The service operates as an intermediary to protect the user’s identity
Digital certificate — using encryption technology a document can be digitally stamped or certified as to its place of origin. A certification authority supports or legitimizes the certificates
Digital signature — digital certification or stamp that authenticates an individual’s signature is legitimate. This is done using encryption technology.
Encryption — the scrambling of digital information so that it is unreadable to the average user. A computer must have digital keys to unscramble and read the information.
Code of fair information practices — there must be no personal data record-keeping systems whose very existence is secret. There must be a way for a user to find out what personal information has been recorded and how it is used. There must be a way for a user to prevent a site or company from using personal information for any reason other than its original intent. There must be a way for a user to correct or amend a record of identifiable information about the person. Any entity creating, maintaining, using or disseminating records of identifiable personal data must assure the reliability of the data for their intended use and must take precautions to prevent misuses of the data.
Dynamic IP Address — an IP address that changes every time a user logs on, or dials up, to a computer
P3P — acronym for Platform for Privacy Preferences Project. It is a proposed browser feature that would analyze privacy policies and allow a user to control what personal information is revealed to a certain site.