The CDT survey showed that only one-third of federal Web sites have "privacy notice" or "privacy policy" links from the agency home page and only half had notices that could be found with only a few short links. This comes despite new guidelines issued by the federal Chief Information Officers and repeated past criticism of the federal government’s failure to comply with its own policy. "Many agencies are hiding privacy notices in legal disclaimers or burying them in the Web site," said Ari Schwartz, CDT Policy Analyst. "If the government is serious about privacy, then as a first step privacy notices should be easy to find and understand."

Although not the main focus of the survey, CDT’s results also revealed that that some agencies have particularly bad privacy policies:

• The CIA does not have a privacy notice, but a "consent to monitoring" policy instead, stating the agency’s intent to track information on visitors.
  
• At the time of CDT’s survey, the Veteran’s Administration did not have a detailed notice either. Instead, the VA was simply linking to all the information collected about individuals by the VA Web site.

At a privacy conference last week in Washington, Swire said that the Office of Management and Budget has considerable power to ensure that Federal agencies respond to privacy concerns. CDT has written a letter asking Swire to prove that assertion by enforcing the Administration’s call for the posting of good privacy policies. "We urge OMB to send a memo informing agencies that they must post a privacy policy reviewed by your office and plainly linked from the agency home page, within 30 days, or risk a cut in their Information Technology budget," the letter read.