Privacy Policy Provision Patterns Among the Top One Hundred Nonprofit Websites

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

Fall 2023

Abstract

Nonprofits in need of developing or refining their website privacy policies might benefit from reviewing the content of other nonprofits’ privacy policies. They could do “one-stopshopping by looking for the longest policies, highest website rankings, most recent policy years, or highest reading grade level. These four characteristics might increase their chance of finding desirable provisions beyond only using keywords and key phrases. The use of only keywords or phrases might not be beneficial in some cases because illegal, awkwardly worded, and out-ofcontext phrases might be found. This study incorporated human and machine learning content analyses of 100 nonprofits’ online privacy policies to find the association between 71 nonprofit privacy policy provisions and the four characteristics. Although the number of words in the policies positively correlated with the sum of privacy policy provisions, the number of words did not have many more specific provisions than policy age, reading grade level, and website rank. The number of words has the most significant relationship with liability and fraud-related provisions. Other significant relationships with the number of words include the personally identifiable information collected such as emails and photos. Longer privacy policies do not significantly increase the chances of finding specific provisions.

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