COMPARISON OF NEWSPAPER CHARACTERISTICS TO PRIVACY POLICY CLAIMS

Gundars Kaupins
Boise State University

ABSTRACT

The online presence of newspapers can reduce readers’ privacy as they join chats, click on any page, or order products from a third party vendor. Online newspaper privacy policies explain a process to manage such issues. Newspaper characteristics such as circulation rates, quality, credibility, and political leaning can potentially influence such policies. These newspaper characteristics are compared to privacy policy complexity variables such as the year of policy updates, number of words, readability, and policy comprehensiveness involving types of reader data collected, data collection methods, uses, and restrictions toward collecting reader data. Results showed that circulation of the newspapers were strongly related to privacy policy complexity. The year in which the privacy policy was updated was positively associated with the variety of data newspapers claim to collect.

Keywords: Newspapers, privacy policies, readability, circulation, credibility, politics, complexity