The Direct Marketing Association introduced its privacy policy generator yesterday for use by financial institutions that must comply with the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Financial Modernization Act of 1999.
The tool, which is free to DMA members, was presented at a public workshop on effective financial privacy notices held by the Federal Trade Commission.
Under GLB, July 1 was the deadline for banks and other financial institutions to provide clear disclosure of their privacy policies regarding the sharing of nonpublic personal information with both affiliates and third parties and to give notice to consumers and an opportunity to opt out of sharing nonpublic personal information with nonaffiliated third parties. The privacy notices must be sent annually.
The FTC and several other agencies are responsible for auditing financial institutions for GLB compliance.
Initial GLB notices sent by financial institutions were widely criticized as unintelligible to the public.
The privacy policy generator was designed to meet the requirements of GLB and to improve the readability of the statements to a ninth- or 10th-grade reading level, according to the DMA.
A text version of the tool can be accessed at the DMA's Web site, www.the-dma.org.
