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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) by acid andy on Wednesday October 11 2017, @08:08PM (3 children)
Just use they / them already!
It sounds perfectly fine. The meaning is clear and there's no ambiguity over single versus plural because the person has already been introduced at the start of the sentence.
Surely, surely this is infinitely preferable to the awful clumsiness of alternating genders or using "he" or some other made up words?
The amount of time people spend arguing over this seems to suggest that my solution must be absolutely intolerable to a great number of people, otherwise everyone would just STFU and use it. So seriously, what gives?
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 12 2017, @12:55AM (2 children)
Sure, [ab]using the plural forms works for everyday, mundane discussions in vernacular, casual speech. However, when precise language is important, such usage totally destroys the ability to convey nuance.
This is the reason that sentences in modern mathematical logic are constructed in terms of individuals rather than groups (unlike the old, tired, limited Aristotelian logical forms). [Ab]using the plural forms not only betrays heuristic failures in the mind and thus poor thinking, but also leads to further poor thinking.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Thursday October 12 2017, @08:28AM (1 child)
As does [ab]using the masculine form. There may be a historical precedent for its use but that doesn't make it any more logical or unambiguous.
See my example here [soylentnews.org] for the ambiguity.*
Honestly, the only form I can see that would fit your very specific criteria would be "it" (It would have worked well in my shadowy figure example) but don't be surprised if that causes you a few problems when you use it in some contexts in polite society.
*Note though that "base of cliff" should be "base of the cliff".
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 12 2017, @09:38AM
How many times must this be pointed out to you?
If you want to refer to a male explicitly, then use an articled "man": "a man", or "the man".
Of course the word "it" cannot be used; there is a need to speak of non-human things (human language is mainly about expressing the human experience):
He and she did it in from of them.