Ranking Privacy Policy

Almost all company Web sites collect some information about the user in some form. The information may be a simple IP address of the host to extensive personal information about the user. It is now a well established procedure for a company to state its privacy policy on their website, due to the prevalent laws of the land or just to establish their credibility. But the stated privacy policy may not be fully understood by Web site visitors. In this paper, we suggest a mathematical model which will assign a privacy score/rank to a privacy policy, after analyzing the different components of that company´s privacy statement. This score can be one criterion to decide whether to continue using a certain Web site.