Privacy honoured?
The privacy policy for Hulu, a video-streaming service with about 9 million subscribers, opens with a declaration that the company respects your privacy.
That respect could lapse, however, if the company is ever sold or goes bankrupt. At that point, according to a clause several screens deep in the policy, the host of details that Hulu can gather about subscribers’ names, birth dates, email addresses, videos watched, device locations and more could be transferred to one or more third parties as part of the transaction. The policy does not promise to contact users if their data changes hands.
Provisions like that act as a sort of data fire sale clause. They are becoming standard among the most popular sites, according to a recent analysis by The New York Times of the top 100 websites in the United States as ranked by Alexa, an Internet analytics firm. "It’s we are never going to sell your data, except if we need to or sell the company," Hal F. Morris, the assistant attorney general of Texas, said about industry practices. Hulu declined to comment.
NYT News Service
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