Privacy Policy Analysis of Popular Web Platforms Sherali Zeadally and Stephanie Winkler P Figure 1. Sign up screenshots from LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook. Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MTS.2016.2554419 Date of publication: 2 June 2016 june 2016 ∕ rivacy is a primary concern of Internet users today, but still ma ny users do not seem to understand just how much of their personal i n for ma t ion i s pu bl ic l y available. This could be ex- plained in part by the complexity of privacy policies of most online web platforms. When the Internet first became commer- cially available for use in the 1990s there was no clear indication of how much this platform would become integrated into the lives of the population today. There was not a significant need to think of privacy online in the beginning because the tech- nology was not widespread and had little commercial interest compared to the Int- ernet today. Commercial companies have a long histor y of fa ilure when initia lly attempting to advertise on a new media medium [20]. The Internet has been no dif- ferent. Google fundamentally changed how Internet marketing operates by introducing a method that transforms its users into a commodity that can be sold [26]. This par- ticular method was a mix between charg- ing advertisers per click for the clicks that their advertisements received from users, and collecting vast amounts of user infor- mation that could be sold to advertisers for IEEE Technology and Society Magazine 1932-4529/16©2016IEEE 75