Privacy Policies Spread Confusion

A recent USA Today article, "Privacy Isn't Public Knowledge," took an interesting tack: they asked a psychologist and linguistics expert to analyze the privacy polices of ten major websites. His conclusions aren't surprising: these policies mainly confuse people. "If you really don't want people to understand, write it in legalese and have it run on for four or five pages. People will say, 'To hell with it...'" Longest sentence: 174 words.

Comments

Well duh

[LoonXTall]

I've read some of them. 3 times is what it usually takes to get a good idea of what's happening. eGroups, for instance, nearly tricked me into thinking they would give out my info to advertisers that wanted to target me. What really goes on though (according to policy) is that advertisers say they want to target a specific group; the targeting is done on eGroup's server as it writes the HTML. This leaves a gaping hole for the advertisers to match their target group to my IP when my browser requests the GIF (if I had images on). However, they don't exercise that hole right now... the ads come off an eGroups server as well.

So of course privacy policies need improved. But is there a way to do it in English that will hold up in court?

-- LoonXTall