Examining the contents of privacy policies on the local government websites : the case of Australia

With ever increasing levels of government information and services online and the level of citizen data being collected via government websites, 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 egovernment 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 websites operate and identify and discuss non legal factors that may affect the quality of these statements.