Digital Privacy

Google's unified privacy policy

A paper, already published in 2008, by Aleecia McDonald and Lorrie Cranor of the Carnegie Mellon University, suggests that the time needed to read all privacy policies we accept in our daily online lives amounts to 250 hours of “work” in a year and the cost of reading these policies amounts to $781 Billion per year. It is obvious that no one can spare the time to read these policies and I do not know anyone who does. It is also obvious that these are not there to inform the user in any way but to create legal protection for the companies against lawsuits. As a result, it is claimed that only 3% percent of users read the policies carefully (though this number still sounds quite high to me, the original study does not seem to be available anymore).

Even though quite controversial, I believe the new Google Privacy Policy, which unifies privacy policies from all Google services, is a step in the right direction. At least they try to explain to the user what it means. Also Facebook recently proposed to update their policies in order to be easier to understand for users. And since a large portion of services we use are Google or Facebook anyway, we save a big chunk from those 250 hours per year…