When a Company Is Put Up for Sale, in Many Cases, Your Personal Data Is, Too - The New York Times
▻http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/29/technology/when-a-company-goes-up-for-sale-in-many-cases-so-does-your-personal-data.ht
The privacy policy for Hulu, a video-streaming service with about nine 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.
Of the 99 sites with English-language terms of service or privacy policies, 85 said they might transfer users’ information if a merger, acquisition, bankruptcy, asset sale or other transaction occurred, The Times’s analysis found. The sites with these provisions include prominent consumer technology companies like Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and LinkedIn, in addition to Hulu.
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Online Data Policies ... in Plain English
Details from the privacy policies of five companies offer a sampling of how they may handle personal data in the event of a sale or bankruptcy.
“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.
Voilà - parce qu’il est trop beau ...
Hal Morris, assistant attorney general of Texas, helped block the dating site True.com from selling data on 43 million members. Credit Sandy Carson for The New York Times 