A trio of Yale students has developed a free service to help users navigate the ins and outs of privacy agreements
Facebook’s privacy policy is 6,946 words long. Google’s is a comparatively spartan 2,281 words. Read them lately? I didn’t think so.
Website privacy policies, like their terms of use agreements, are onerously long, bafflingly complex legal documents that hundreds of millions of people accept without ever reading. As social media sites accrue more and more of our personal information while always developing new ways to exploit our data, they are increasingly targeted by hackers and law enforcement. In short, those long privacy statements, which we never read and which get longer all the time, matter more and more.
That’s why a trio of Yale students have developed a free service for websites called Privacy Simplified. Answer a few questions about your site and PS will generate a series of icons you can display to clearly explain the most important aspects of your privacy policy. For example, here’s what Facebook’s would look like:
And here’s what it all means:
These icons might need some fine-tuning, but they’re a fantastic starting-point. We desperately need a shorthand for privacy online. The only problem is that there’s no real reason for a website to use this code if it tells users anything negative or troubling about their business. Best to leave those needles in a 5000+ word haystack.
Jesse Brown is the host of TVO.org’s Search Engine podcast. He is on Twitter @jessebrown