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."

Comments

It's Quite Obvious Why They're At This Level

[eldavojohn]

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.

Re:Word length

[oldspewey]

Who has time to read 5000 words?

You just need to break the task down and come up with a manageable work plan - if you tackle 5 words a day, you'll be done in less than 3 years.

From a lawyer's perspective...

[imyy4u3]

I really don't see the point in these privacy policies. They are written in the most boring, impossible-to-comprehend way in the hopes that no one will actually take the time to figure out what the policy is. Because let's face it, if everyone knew that Slashdot's privacy policy allows them to sell your email address and first born child (just kidding!), no one would sign up on the site. So companies word these statements in a way that discourages anyone from reading them, yet still covers their ass if they get sued.

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.

Dubious measure.

[ledow]

I don't believe it for a second - the measures used are dubious at best (try the Word readability macros and see for yourself - they do Fleisch-Kincaid scores too). At minimum, they have to be used properly. For instance, the single word text "communication" is so unutterably high on all the indices that it skews the results completely. And the text of Alice in Wonderland on Project Gutenberg scored:

Coleman Liau index : 28.19
Flesh Kincaid Grade level : 11.95
ARI (Automated Readability Index) : 21.61
SMOG : 11.68

So that's a hefty margin of error, removes all use of any average and says that you have to be a virtual genius to read Alice in Wonderland, or a 11th-grader. Mmm. Yes. Accurate measure.

Re:Dubious measure.

[ledow]

I did - with several PG texts. Alice shows the most "variability" of the ones I tried between the different scores. Are these same grading schemes designed to cope with pages of numbered T&C's? I don't know. The point is that the measures are useless unless used under certain conditions and no effort has been made to ensure those conditions were met.

It's a poor application of what are basically statistical formulae on the lengths of certain words. What if the ISP's name was "BT" compared to "International Communications"? What if one ISP uses the "hereafter referred to as THE COMPANY" trick and one states the company name each time? It's a totally bogus measure. I could easily form any conclusion I felt like by playing with this "experiment" and it would be hard to argue against it without a basic knowledge of statistics. However, the article's approach is completely rubbish and anyone who looks at what those grades measure can see it's a waste of time.

That said, most ISP T&C's don't follow the "plain English" doctrine more than "we use long words". They HAVE to use long words, the technical descriptions demand it most of the time. I could reword any of those T&C's to be MORE difficult to understand, despite being perfect English, and get a lower reading score.

If you're gonna quote numbers about something, know what the numbers mean and how they apply.

Re:Word length

[sm62704]

Actually, in most case (although not a legal document, even an illegal legal document like a EULA) the lower the education level needed to read, the more intelligent the writer.

For example, Isaac Asimov's books are written at roughly an eighth grade level, and his nonfiction still managed to educate intelligent, learned people. He was actually called "the great educator". Dr. Asimov held a PhD in biochemistry and taught and did research at (IIRC) Boston University. Asimov was a very intelligent man with a great imagination, and was one hell of a writer.

OTOH I read a paper once by some dimwit PhD who used the word "enumerate" five times in a single paragraph without once using the word "count". Writing like this is intended to obfuscate rather than illuminate, and its sole purpose is usually to impress you with how intelligent the moron is.

In a EULA the obfuscation's purpose is obviously to make you think the damned people won't use your personal information when in fact it actually says the opposite. These people are just slimy.

The thesaurus entry for obfuscate says bewilder, blur, cloud, confuse, darken, dim, garble, hide, muddle, obscure, perplex, puzzle. None are exact synonyms, so sorry; I'm not smart enough to convey this information well.