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We Read 150 Privacy Policies. They Were an Incomprehensible Disaster.

posted by chromas on Friday June 14 2019, @10:25PM   Printer-friendly
from the data-sharing-policies dept.

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

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.

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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by darkfeline on Saturday June 15 2019, @06:43AM (3 children)

    by darkfeline (1030) on Saturday June 15 2019, @06:43AM (#855930) Homepage

    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.

    Uh, yeah, you have to understand the basics before more complex things can be explained to you. You can't expect someone to explain reality to you in baby language because reality is complex. This is like expecting someone to explain rocket science to you without chemistry or aerodynamics, then when you go build a rocket that lurches sideways, smashes through the window, and explodes, killing your pet dog, you blame your teacher.

    somewhere outside of and beyond our universe is an operating system [...] The demiurge sits at his teletype, pounding out one command line after another, specifying the values of fundamental constants of physics [...] and when he's finished typing out the command line, his right pinky hesitates above the ENTER key for an aeon or two, wondering what's going to happen; then down it comes--and the WHACK you hear is another Big Bang.

    Now THAT is a cool operating system, and if such a thing were actually made available on the Internet (for free, of course) every hacker in the world would download it right away and then stay up all night long messing with it [...] Most of them would be pretty dull universes but some of them would be simply amazing. Because what those hackers would be aiming for would be much more ambitious than a universe that had a few stars and galaxies in it. Any run-of-the-mill hacker would be able to do that. No, the way to gain a towering reputation on the Internet would be to get so good at tweaking your command line that your universes would spontaneously develop life. And once the way to do that became common knowledge, those hackers would move on, trying to make their universes develop the right kind of life, trying to find the one change in the Nth decimal place of some physical constant that would give us an Earth in which, say, Hitler had been accepted into art school after all, and had ended up his days as a street artist with cranky political opinions.

    Even if that fantasy came true, though, most users (including myself, on certain days) wouldn't want to bother learning to use all of those arcane commands [...] we would start to long for an OS that would go all the way to the opposite extreme: an OS that had the power to do everything--to live our life for us. In this OS, all of the possible decisions we could ever want to make would have been anticipated by clever programmers, and condensed into a series of dialog boxes. By clicking on radio buttons we could choose from among mutually exclusive choices (HETEROSEXUAL/HOMOSEXUAL). Columns of check boxes would enable us to select the things that we wanted in our life (GET MARRIED/WRITE GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL) and for more complicated options we could fill in little text boxes (NUMBER OF DAUGHTERS: NUMBER OF SONS:).

    Even this user interface would begin to look awfully complicated after a while [...] The people who brought us this operating system would have to provide templates and wizards, giving us a few default lives that we could use as starting places for designing our own. Chances are that these default lives would actually look pretty damn good to most people, good enough, anyway, that they'd be reluctant to tear them open and mess around with them for fear of making them worse. So after a few releases the software would begin to look even simpler: you would boot it up and it would present you with a dialog box with a single large button in the middle labeled: LIVE. Once you had clicked that button, your life would begin. If anything got out of whack, or failed to meet your expectations, you could complain about it to Microsoft's Customer Support Department. If you got a flack on the line, he or she would tell you that your life was actually fine, that there was not a thing wrong with it, and in any event it would be a lot better after the next upgrade was rolled out. But if you persisted, and identified yourself as Advanced, you might get through to an actual engineer.

    What would the engineer say, after you had explained your problem, and enumerated all of the dissatisfactions in your life? He would probably tell you that life is a very hard and complicated thing; that no interface can change that; that anyone who believes otherwise is a sucker; and that if you don't like having choices made for you, you should start making your own.

    If you refuse to take the time to become informed and make choices, then don't whine about choices being made for you. Yes, that means learning about cookies and IP address, boo hoo, and god forbid, reading for 20 minutes.

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  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday June 15 2019, @04:23PM (2 children)

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Saturday June 15 2019, @04:23PM (#856017) Journal

    Uh, yeah, you have to understand the basics before more complex things can be explained to you.

    One of the first things that should be coming to your mind is why does humanity need rules so complex that even the people writing them have trouble understanding what they mean? Obfuscation is a big reason why.

    • (Score: 2) by darkfeline on Sunday June 16 2019, @04:12AM (1 child)

      by darkfeline (1030) on Sunday June 16 2019, @04:12AM (#856153) Homepage

      Yes, cookies and IP addresses are all a big conspiracy to make it hard to understand technology. Complex things are complex.

      And yes, that includes legal literature. It turns out simple rules don't work because reality is complicated. More and more exceptions get added over time, and here we are.

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      • (Score: 1) by khallow on Monday June 17 2019, @03:34AM

        by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Monday June 17 2019, @03:34AM (#856482) Journal

        Yes, cookies and IP addresses are all a big conspiracy to make it hard to understand technology.

        You don't need to "exceed the college reading level" in order to explain cookies and IP addresses.