Chrome/Firefox: Privacy policies are long and complicated legalese, but they’re important to review if you want to know how a company will handle your data, whether they will sell it, or whether they will respect your rights. Disconnect’s new Privacy Icons make those policies visual, with icons you can understand at a glance.
Disconnect, makers of our favourite privacy-protecting browser extensions, rolled out the new icons this week as a way for people to have a visual cue as to whether the site they’re about to sign up for will harvest their data and sell it, respect their privacy, honour do-not-track requests, is vulnerable to Heartbleed, offers SSL support and so on.
Once you’re familiar with the icons and what they mean, you’ll be able to tell quickly how seriously a site takes your privacy, and how well it handles your data. For example, there are icons that tell you the site does collect data, but in a manner that’s consistent with what the site does or how it works. There are others that indicate whether the site respects the privacy of children, or if it’s TRUSTe certified. You can see a rundown of all of the icons at the link below. The information is powered by TRUSTe’s database, which has information on thousands of privacy policies for popular sites around the globe, so you’re already off to a good start.
The extension obviously won’t work on every site, since the program is just now rolling out, but as more site owners participate and the database grows, you’ll be able to tell whether a site protects your privacy just by looking at the icons in the toolbar, the same way you check for the lock in the URL bar to see if the site is secure. Hit the link below to give it a try.
Privacy Icons [Disconnect]
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