Combined Analysis of Website Practices

Here we present our analysis for each website on our list of the top 50 most visited sites.*

Each profile displays:

• The key facets from our analysis of the website's privacy policy.
• The policy's readability score using the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level test
• The number of web bugs found on the site in March 2009
• The website's parent company
• The number of subsidiaries listed under the parent company in March/April 2009

Privacy Policy Analysis Methodology

For an explanation of our methods of analysis, see the following pages:

• Policy coding methodology
• Web bugs methodology
• Affiliates methodology

* Our determination of the most visited websites is based on the top 100 US website list published by web traffic monitor Quantcast (as of March 1, 2009). Quantcast's list is based on their direct measurement and estimation of unique U.S. website visitors per month to the listed sites.