Blog homeLast September 07 I came up with a “Canary” describing how to judge a website by the number of “click here” links there are on the site. Obviously the fewer the better.
Maybe I have found another Canary - the privacy policy URL. In my opinion having a clean URL for the privacy policy tends to indicate a well thought out website.
For example some nice ones from leading websites….
Yahoo
http://info.yahoo.com/privacy/us/yahoo/details.html - a bit of a mess, but acceptable
Google
http://www.google.com/privacy.html - clean, simple, easy
Microsoft
http://privacy.microsoft.com/ - clean and simple, but over-engineered
BBC
http://www.bbc.co.uk/privacy/ - elegant and classic
So lets look at some online travel ones - not really as neat….
Opodo
http://www.opodo.co.uk/opodo/StrutsServlet/DisplaySiteInfoPage?pageName=privacy - oh dear
Expedia
http://www.expedia.co.uk/daily/service/privacy.asp - quite simple
Orbitz
http://www.orbitz.com/pagedef/content/legal/privacy05.jsp?popupsDisabled=false - in a popup
TravelSupermarket
http://www.moneysupermarket.com/legal/PrivacyPolicy.asp - I don’t want legal information - and besides, the privacy policy is on a different site domain.
and a tie for the winner….
Kayak
http://www.kayak.co.uk/help/privacy.html - better to help than give legal info
WAYN
http://www.wayn.com/privacy.html - perfect (looks like they copied Google)
So next time you want to quickly evaluate a website - take a look at the privacy policy URL - it may just be a great indicator of how well thought out the site is. YMMV.
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