Saturday, June 30, 2012

When is privacy not privacy

Recently I received this email from TurboTax.


TurboTax(R) - Choose Easy. Privacy Notification




Dear Valued TurboTax Customer,

You're receiving this notice because your e-mail address is registered with TurboTax(R) and we want to share our privacy statement with you.

As the trusted steward of your data, we place the highest importance on your privacy and our principles require that we all be accountable for your privacy. Therefore, without your explicit permission, we will not sell, publish or share data entrusted to us that identifies you.

We value our relationship with you and want you to feel confident when using our products and services and entrusting your personal information to us.

Sincerely,
The TurboTax Team

P.S. If you'd like to learn more about Intuit's privacy policies or want to update your privacy preferences, you can visit us at http://privacy.intuit.com.

 
By way of setting context, TurboTax is a great product, witness their market share.  I've used it for several years and been reasonably satisified.

But is this reasonable privacy?  On first reading it might seem OK but what it doesn't say raises some issues.  This policy doesn't say that TurboTax will not sell my data, only that it will not explicitly identify it as belonging to me.  It doesn't say that TurboTax will not sell my email address.  It doesn't say that TurboTax won't aggregate my data to identify the town I live in or the street I live on as appropriate for some purpose.

Common Sense wonders, when is privacy not private?

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