Welcome to our guided tour of online privacy policies!

We’ve just published our report, “How to Read a Privacy Policy” on our website.  You may have seen some of the blog posts we wrote summarizing each section, but you can now find all the sections together here.There are other privacy policy analyses out there: Privacy International's 2007 report describing privacy practices of major companies in general and Know Privacy, a research project created by students from the UC Berkeley School of Information that compares user expectations with data collection methods today for policymakers and website operators.But we thought there was room for one more, one that takes the web user on a guided tour of that inscrutable document, the online privacy policy, and explains what issues she should keep in mind.  We walk through the privacy policies of companies like Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, and Amazon, as of June 2009, and explain what they’re promising and what they’re not.A quick visual of how privacy policies stack up next to each other, literally. See it bigger.Questions or comments?  Please let us know!