A Study of Online Privacy Policies of South African Retail Websites

Abstract

Consumers today are pushing for greater transparency over the potential collection and use of their personal information (PI). It is key for organizations dealing with consumer PI to address privacy concerns and challenges. The use of an online privacy policy is one of the most effective ways of informing consumers about an organization’s use of their PI and security measures they have adopted to protect it against possible threats. The purpose of this paper is to firstly, propose a holistic set of online privacy policy guidelines and secondly, to ascertain to what extent online privacy policies, within the South African retail sphere, address the guidelines. This, in turn, also provides an indication as to whether the online privacy policies address conditions of the Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA). Both qualitative and quantitative analysis methods were used on a sample of 18 retail websites. While it was found that all retail websites had an online privacy policy, some were still failing to meet the pro-posed guidelines and as such recommendations for improvement are provided relating specifically to access, third-parties, information quality and accountability.