The short answer is no.  As in the “real” world most businesses are legitimate and simply want to provide their products or services.   However, there are many pitfalls on the Internet.  

While many web sites do not do anything “bad” to their customers or web visitors, their policies have no relation to reality.  Most sites simply copy some hard-to-read policy and plug in their contact information.  Policies often do not have contact information that is answered or no contact information is provided at all.  Most policies are written without actually researching what happens to the information they collect.   

Many of the large companies, with TRUSTe privacy seals, are some of the worst.  Often nobody will respond to privacy policy inquiries.  When TRUSTe received several complaints after response time was tested they simply removed the response requirement for their members! 

This happens because companies believe most users don’t care about their privacy policies and most users don’t read them.  Web site statistics show this to be true for the most part but users are becoming increasingly aware of the impact of the policies.  Some reasons for this are increased security breaches resulting in identity theft, seeing social networking profiles on the news, and attempts by sites such as Facebook to change their policy.