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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 11 2017, @04:56PM
This articles solution won't work. Greed drives companies and the only way to convince them to make a decisions will be if it affects their bottom line.
We would need privacy laws that protect citizen's privacy and are enforced with punishments that kill a companies bottom line. Having national rules instead of per company rules would also make it easier for people to understand (i.e. one or several sets of rules instead of a huge number that can change at any time). Getting this done on a national level would be difficult as the Democratic party is sold out to corporations and the Republican party is sold out and seems to actively hate the majority of the country's citizens. But this would be part of the best solution.
Technical solutions blocking identifying information, like those mentioned in comments above, would be good in any case.