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from the don't-make-them-100-pages-long dept.
The key to turning privacy notices into something useful for consumers is to rethink their purpose. A company's policy might show compliance with the regulations the firm is bound to follow, but remains impenetrable to a regular reader.
The starting point for developing consumer-friendly privacy notices is to make them relevant to the user's activity, understandable and actionable. As part of the Usable Privacy Policy Project, my colleagues and I developed a way to make privacy notices more effective.
The first principle is to break up the documents into smaller chunks and deliver them at times that are appropriate for users. Right now, a single multi-page policy might have many sections and paragraphs, each relevant to different services and activities. Yet people who are just casually browsing a website need only a little bit of information about how the site handles their IP addresses, if what they look at is shared with advertisers and if they can opt out of interest-based ads. Those people doesn't[sic] need to know about many other things listed in all-encompassing policies, like the rules associated with subscribing to the site's email newsletter, nor how the site handles personal or financial information belonging to people who make purchases or donations on the site.
When a person does decide to sign up for email updates or pay for a service through the site, then an additional short privacy notice could tell her the additional information she needs to know. These shorter documents should also offer users meaningful choices about what they want a company to do – or not do – with their data. For instance, a new subscriber might be allowed to choose whether the company can share his email address or other contact information with outside marketing companies by clicking a check box.
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 11 2017, @04:48PM (4 children)
letmestopyourightthere
Have they ever seen people use a computer? Nobody reads two-word dialog boxes.
Users don't read anything. [joelonsoftware.com]
(Score: 4, Funny) by frojack on Wednesday October 11 2017, @05:17PM (1 child)
TL;DR
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Wednesday October 11 2017, @06:15PM
Both of you are wrong.
Users don't read anything!
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Wednesday October 11 2017, @07:12PM (1 child)
OK, then let's make it with images. I mean, the standard policy is "we get everything, you are fucked." I'm sure that can be put into an easy to understand picture. ;-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 12 2017, @10:40PM
It's been done. You'll find the picture over at http://goatse.cx/ [goatse.cx]. The only thing that picture is missing is the sentence "this is what we expect from you when you do business with us"