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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: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 11 2017, @04:12PM
There's a thing you need to understand: companies want their policies to be impenetrable because they are used to fuck over their users, their products, their partners and everyone else they can fuck over. These things are written by lawyers who always ask the same thing: "how can we constrain the other guy while giving us free reign?" or "you may not want to do X now, but what about tomorrow... you don't know whether you'll want to do that tomorrow. Don't lock yourself out from doing that tomorrow and enshrine this into this policy". They embed things like "and we can change this whenever we feel like it" or "in case of a dispute, someone who works for us will decide on the matter (and in our favor)" for these types of reasons.
There's a very good reason why these policies are always in ALL CAPS because it makes them even less comprehensible.
You've identified a valid problem, but you're going about the wrong way to try to solve it!
Good luck finding companies that actually take your advice and incorporate it into their practices! I'm not holding my breath...