On-line survey on privacy‏

What does it mean to ‘give consent’ when you sign up for an online service such as Facebook or YouTube or give your details to a company selling you goods online. It is not clear just what web site users think they are doing when they give consent, nor whether they know what the company intends to do with any personal information. The EU funded CONSENT project is a Europe-wide team from a number of universities investigating these issues and will be reporting to the European Commission who are considering whether they should legislate on what it means when a web site user ‘gives consent’ and what may be done with that data.

As first part of the project the team are collecting responses to an online survey. This takes around 10-15 minutes maximum and seeks to find out what users actually do – do you read privacy statements, do you know how the system settings can be changed, etc. This is obviously important and your input will help build a picture of what is happening across Europe and whether there is a real problem which needs addressing.

If you have a few spare minutes, please complete the anonymous survey at:

http://bit.ly/Survey-CONSENT

If you have any queries about the project, you can contact one of the members of the team from the UK, Philip Leith of Queen’s University of Belfast at p.leith@qub.ac.uk The web site for the CONSENT project is at http://consent.law.muni.cz/