An examination of the contents of privacy policies on the Australian local government websites

With ever increasing levels of government information and services moving online and the level of citizen data being collected via government web sites, users are concerned about how their personal information will be collected, used and secured. Privacy is viewed as a primary concern for e-government websites. While there are considerable studies on consumer online privacy concerns in the research literature, few studies have focused on the privacy issues of the constituencies of local e-government. This paper attempts to address this lack by examining the contents of privacy policies published on the Australian local e-government sites using a content analysis approach. The research is committed to online privacy protection with a focus on privacy policies posted on the local councils' websites in the GWS region, Australia. To examine and assess how the local government authorities address online privacy issues and their degree of compliance with legislation, this study attempts to analyse the posted privacy statements of the local government websites against the legal mandates under which the web sites operate and identify and discuss non legal factors that may affect the quality of these statements. The research findings show that 43% of the websites surveyed do not display a privacy policy statement while 36% appear to have a weak policy statement. Serious deficiencies in relation to the collection, access, amendment, use and disclosure of personal data were found in the privacy policy statements examined. Widespread non-compliance with the legislation indicates that the privacy statements are not effective in protecting user privacy online. In addition to compliance with the legislation, the aspects of transparency, readability and detailed information are seen as important for a desirable privacy policy. The lack of details, clarity and transparency in privacy policy statements prevents users from understanding the content and potential issues in submitting their personal data. The results of the analysis indicate attempts to display and develop an effective privacy policy have not been made by the vast majority of the websites examined The analyses can be used as guidelines in ensuring that an organisation's website privacy policy is in compliance with privacy legislation. The discussion on weakness in current privacy policy practices provides information that can guide government authorities when they prepare for privacy policy statements for their websites.