f information about the user that the insurer has raises privacy related questions. The potential problems with regard to the use of consumer information could be:Unwanted spam from the insurance companyLeakage of information related to the client during transmission to the web server or from the database of the insurance company as a result of hacking activity.The insurer indulging in abusing the data about its consumers by selling the information to others.Being a software solutions provider, most of the responsibility for ensuring online privacy for users does not rest with MphasiS. It is the Insurance Company’s responsibility to formulate, explicitly state and implement an appropriate privacy policy. However, the solutions provider does have a role to play in the following aspects:Ensuring the security of any personal information that the users provide to the web site. This implies that any sensitive information like credit card numbers should be transferred across secured channels and stored in encrypted formats, in order to minimize the risk of hacking.Compliance with the P3P standard. The P3P (Platform for Privacy Preferences) standard attempts to provide a means by which users and web sites can achieve mutual understanding and agreement on the privacy policy of the web site. According to the standards, the browser will be able to interpret the privacy policy of the web site, since it will be implemented in XML. The P3P specification also recommends that any web page that gathers user information should have a distinct privacy policy associated with it. This implies that adequate provisions to comply with P3P standards be incorporated into the design of the web site. (For details on P3P, see Appendix)12PERSONALIZATION METRICSThe objective of the personalization effort on an insurance web site is two fold:To convert visitors to customersTo cross sell/up sell to existing customersIn order to fulfill the above objectives, i...
