In a survey of the top 100 e-commerce sites, the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) discovered that many of these sites aren’t adequately safeguarding the privacy of their customers. 18 of the 100 surveyed sites had no privacy policy at all, and many of the posted policies were confusing or inconsistent. What’s more, 87 of the sites use cookies to track their customers — not a bad thing in itself, but when there’s no privacy policy explaining how the cookies are being used, that’s cause for concern.

Top Web sites compromise consumer privacy