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posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday October 11 2017, @01:35PM   Printer-friendly
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.


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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by HiThere on Wednesday October 11 2017, @06:56PM (3 children)

    by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday October 11 2017, @06:56PM (#580691) Journal

    That was for a relatively brief period. I think it was common for less than five years. And there was a period when people were inventing pronouns. Which was common for only a short time.

    If you're going to be traditional, then "he" is the gender neutral pronoun. If you're less traditional then there are various ways, the most common of which is to avoid pronouns, but occasionally I'll use the plural form when talking about a single entity, if the other approaches seem too clumsy.

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  • (Score: 2) by acid andy on Wednesday October 11 2017, @08:16PM (2 children)

    by acid andy (1683) on Wednesday October 11 2017, @08:16PM (#580769) Homepage Journal

    If you're going to be traditional, then "he" is the gender neutral pronoun.

    The biggest problem I have with it is that it can actually mislead the reader:

    I squinted at the shadowy figure, struggling to make out detail in the haze. The figure strode purposefully over to the base of cliff and then he stretched an arm up and began to climb.

    This makes it seem to the reader that perhaps I was able to determine the gender of the shadowy figure and that if so, the figure was a male. If "he" is being used in a gender neutral way, then that is false information.

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    • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday October 11 2017, @11:05PM

      by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday October 11 2017, @11:05PM (#580838) Journal

      I'm not claiming that the traditional usage is free of problems. It clearly isn't, and I, for one, try to avoid it. But it *is* the traditional usage.

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    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 12 2017, @12:59AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 12 2017, @12:59AM (#580884)

      The misinterpretation is the reader's (e.g., yours). Unless the author states that it's a man, you shouldn't assume that it is; that assumption is... shall we say... your unconscious, sexist bias—it's clearly a microaggression against the author.

      Your whole life, you've misinterpreted the word "he".