Privacy Policies in Web Sites of Portuguese Municipalities: An Empirical Study

Abstract

In this article we present an empirical study of privacy policies at local government web sites in Portugal. Web sites of all the 308 Portuguese municipalities where surveyed for privacy policy manifests and a content analysis was performed on those documents. We concluded that privacy of citizens is clearly not a priority in Portuguese local government, since only 26% of the municipalities include privacy policy statements in their web sites and many of those documents exhibit significant gaps considering the information that a user would expect to find in a privacy policy. By raising the awareness to the need of improving privacy in local government web sites, our conclusions are useful for both academics and practitioners in the areas of e-government, privacy and local government