Of the two sites of mine that I checked, one came up as "Danger! Warning! They're going to sell your information in case of a Bankruptcy!!!"
Why?
Reading one of the submitter's comments below, it seems to lump "sold the entire company, therefore the user database went with it" into the same category as "we're running out of money, so let's sell everybody's email addresses to spammers."
They're not in any way related. I'd suggest splitting out those two categories, as I suspect it will drop that "bankruptcy email fire sale" category down to somewhere near 0%.
That is a good point. Perhaps the way we've worded it is giving an incorrect impression.
It's tough, most policies look something like this
In the event that XXXXXXX is involved in a bankruptcy, merger, acquisition, reorganization or sale of assets, your information may be sold or transferred as part of that transaction
From what I gather, the example above implies that the company considers your data an asset and it "may be sold" as part of the transaction or bankruptcy.
Help me come up with a better way to describe this situation succinctly! =)
This may be OT, but I'd like to know more about organizational practices (and corresponding contractual language) that mitigate this risk.
My vague impression is that unless one takes deliberate steps to remove such information from the available... "asset pool", when bankruptcy strikes, all bets are off (in the U.S., at least).
Any effective limits after that point seem more often to be PR-based (bad PR decreasing, negating, or even outweighing the value of the information) than due to legal stricture. Or else a matter of getting a "one-off" restriction from a court proceeding.
This is just my impression from the news. I would welcome any clarification.
How about requiring the word "bankruptcy" to appear somewhere in the privacy policy before you put the word "bankruptcy" in big red letters next to the name of somebody else's website?
Err on the side of caution when you've got somebody else's reputation in your hands.
We've reworded the message to mention acquisitions as well for the time being. We're working on better ways to display the information to convey a sense of caution and encourage further reading rather than the feeling of danger associated with the direct sale of information.
Why?
Reading one of the submitter's comments below, it seems to lump "sold the entire company, therefore the user database went with it" into the same category as "we're running out of money, so let's sell everybody's email addresses to spammers."
They're not in any way related. I'd suggest splitting out those two categories, as I suspect it will drop that "bankruptcy email fire sale" category down to somewhere near 0%.