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Opinion | We Read 150 Privacy Policies. They Were an Incomprehensible Disaster.
[...] here are several privacy policies from major tech and media platforms. Like most privacy policies, they’re verbose and full of legal jargon — and opaquely establish companies’ justifications for collecting and selling your data. The data market has become the engine of the internet, and these privacy policies we agree to but don't fully understand help fuel it.
To see exactly how inscrutable they have become, I analyzed the length and readability of privacy policies from nearly 150 popular websites and apps. Facebook’s privacy policy, for example, takes around 18 minutes to read in its entirety – slightly above average for the policies I tested.
Then I tested how easy it was to understand each policy using the Lexile test developed by the education company Metametrics. The test measures a text’s complexity based on factors like sentence length and the difficulty of vocabulary.
[...] The vast majority of these privacy policies exceed the college reading level. And according to the most recent literacy survey conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics, over half of Americans may struggle to comprehend dense, lengthy texts. That means a significant chunk of the data collection economy is based on consenting to complicated documents that many Americans can’t understand.
[...] Despite efforts like the General Data Protection Regulation to make policies more accessible, there seems to be an intractable tradeoff between a policy’s readability and length. Even policies that are shorter and easier to read can be impenetrable, given the amount of background knowledge required to understand how things like cookies and IP addresses play a role in data collection.
“You’re confused into thinking these are there to inform users, as opposed to protect companies,” said Albert Gidari, the consulting director of privacy at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society.
(Score: 1) by anubi on Saturday June 15 2019, @12:03AM (3 children)
Let it be well known that the more incomprehensible it is, the likelihood of it being dishonored is is just that much greater. Claim something already in public use, the whole thing is apt to be tossed out like a half rotted apple.
I
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday June 15 2019, @12:48AM (2 children)
True, however, that does not spare the legal teams of companies attempting to operate in or around the IP space from having to attempt to decipher it just to determine if it is a threat or not... Once granted, a patent is in essence notice of legal threat of suit, and due diligence includes a competent evaluation of that threat - which is considerably more costly when there are 200 claims and a barely comprehensible background with confusing diagrams.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by anubi on Saturday June 15 2019, @01:42AM (1 child)
We need judges that are more inclined to toss the whole shebang.
Once litigants realize their hard won patents are getting tossed in courts over trivial patent troll efforts, they will prefer a defendable position over trying to patent a cloud.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 4, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Saturday June 15 2019, @03:00AM
We need a system where the plaintiffs aren't free to shop jurisdictions (ahem, East Texas).
In 2003 I had 6 patents, I was hired into a new company on the same day as a high powered IP attorney - on that day he mentioned that he expected to be writing many more patents for me... well, he also happened to be the Treasurer of the House majority leader's campaign and so the CEO used him for lobbying instead for the next 2 years. I filed a bunch of invention disclosures, but they were ignored.
One day, fresh back from New York, the CEO walks into a meeting and says: "Our main competitor has had sixty five patents granted in the last year, SIXTY FIVE!!! Anyone know how many we've had? Two. Anyone know what that means? We're sixty three behind, let's get out there and get some patents, PRONTO! All of a sudden there were $500 bonuses for inventors on filing, another $500 on granting - we brought in outside counsel to help speed things up, fully half of my old invention disclosures got filed, plus another three or four before I left that circus for a different one.
From the CEO's perspective, it's nothing about quality, it's all about quantity - sixty five patents at an average cost of $25K per issuance was just a good investment for him, 1.6 million investment in IP bumped up our value multiplier by something like 5-10% (moving from a "weak" IP protection rating on Wall Street to an "average" rating), which translated to an additional 50-100 million in market cap, and a nice kick in the margin on his options. Cue ball couldn't tell you the first thing about the specific merits of any one of those patents, and it just didn't matter in his world.
🌻🌻 [google.com]