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Privacy Policies Are Great — For PhDs
An anonymous reader writes "Major Internet companies say that they inform their customers about privacy issues through specially written policies. What they don't say is that more often than not consumers would need college undergraduate educations or higher to easily wade through the verbiage. BNET looked at 20-some-odd privacy policies from Internet companies that received letters from the House about privacy practices. The easiest to read policy came from Yahoo, at a roughly 12th grade level. Most difficult? Insight Communications, which at a level of over 20 years of eduction officially puts it onto IRS Code territory."
Well--and this is all from the prospective of a geography ignorant non-lawyer American--the fact is that most policies are in place to avoid confusion. Ah, who am I kidding, they're there so nobody sues the hell out of anyone else. And a policy is there to stop the worst kind of lawsuits: class action. I'm sure you would notice this if you did the same analysis of other policies--like healthcare, dental or auto insurance policies. Yes, your health and your automobile might seem more important than your privacy but the United States Justice system (is supposed to--like in the NYTimes article) stop companies from swindling any of those.
And there's not a lot you can do about this, we're going to want to sue the pants off a bastard company if suddenly our name and address is being traded on a disc with 50,000 others on the black market. So they write these policies to be air tight and they use terms that have legal connotations because I'm sure the only time these things are scrutinized are in court anyway. And the second you take away that level of granularity, I'm sure you see yourself as a company open up to lawsuits.
My work here is dung.
Yes, but it's 5000 words long. Who has time to read 5000 words?
Commodore64_love: I don't comprehend people who're so frightened of death that they'll bankrupt themselves to stay alive
I really think something needs to be done about this, because 99.9% of people don't read lengthy EULAs and privacy policies simply because they are too long, boring, and difficult to understand, yet we are agreeing to conditions we probably would never agree to if we knew about them. Perhaps a law stating that the policies must be written at a sixth grade level, use small and non-legal words wherever possible, and come with a 1-page summary of the major rights. I think that would be a fantastic idea.
Um, as far as I can understand, privacy policies are there for legal reasons, written in legalese to give them a quasi-legal basis for defending their policies.
Unless you're a lawyer or have a lawyer present each and every time you agree to a privacy policy (assuming you even agree to it, most are just implied to "work"), then it's basically just embedded, textual bullshit to somehow protect the company from lawsuits.
I seriously doubt that a privacy policy would stand up very well in court, unless the judge is completely in the dark on matters of technology, in which case it's simply a matter of presenting the test case as a physical contract and seeing how it would stand up, or limiting the amount of power a privacy policy holds on a public website.
Disclaimer: IANAL
Once this is taken into account is it any surprise that the vast majority of web users simply click "I agree" to anything they see
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Are these privacy policies any more difficult to read than the rules to McDonalds' annual Monopoly game? Come on, they are worded in a way so as to protect the company posting them, not to genuinely inform their customers.
Whale
I knew I was making those student loan payments for SOMETHING.
And, given my experience working with the typical American, it would be impossible to dumb down anything enough for most of them to understand anyway. When I was in college, I took educated friends and co-workers for granted. When I came out into the "real world" it was a bit of culture shock to realize that the vast majority of real people not only don't have college degrees, but also read at about a "See Dick run" level.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Just read the part that says "No matter what this privacy policy says, we reserve the right to change any part of it in any way at any time without any notice to anyone, and the new policy will automatically and instantly apply to anyone who ever agreed to any other privacy policy we have ever had" and the part that says "we absolutely positively guarantee that we will not share any of your information in any way with anyone ever, except our business partners, which we define as 'anyone who gives us money'".
Every privacy policy I have ever bothered to read contained both of those provisions. With those in place, why bother reading the rest?
Have you met many recent graduates? I'd say "eduction" sits right up there with the current requirements for a Bachelors :(.
Face it, Masters is the new Bachelors and Bachelors is the new High School diploma.
Can someone explain this to me? I live in the U.S. now, but grew up elsewhere, and I don't get how the university system works here.
When I went through university (outside the U.S.), I studied science: computer science, physics, calculus, etc. My friends who were doing anthropology or commerce studied, well, anthropology and sociology, or accounting and economics and so forth. There seemed to be an implicit assumption that the basics of reading and writing and history and anything else outside of your core degree were, you know, taught at school before you got to university. University was supposed to be where you studied a more specialized course of study.
So how the heck does the U.S. get to the point where, so far as I can tell, pretty much all university students are required to study basic history, or politics, or who knows what else that has nothing to do with their core course of study? (And I haven't even started on the whole "changing majors" yet.) If you haven't learned enough of those fundamentals by the time you're in an institution of higher learning, then what have you been doing at school for the last 12 years and how diluted has the value of that bachelor's degree now become?
I agree. It is amazing how many people I have met that had a college education, and not only had a very poor general education, but had a very poor understanding of the subject they majored in in college.
Am I the only one who thought that IRS Code territory is actually pretty simple. Pretty much a bunch of 4th grade arithmitic with some logic operators. Disclaimer: I only have ever had to work on my personal taxes, not corporate taxes.
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