In the background here are several privacy policies from major tech and media platforms. Like most privacy policies, they’re verbose and full of legal jargon — and opaquely establish companies’ justifications for collecting and selling your data. The data market has become the engine of the internet, and these privacy policies we agree to but don’t fully understand help fuel it.

To see exactly how inscrutable they have become, I analyzed the length and readability of privacy policies from nearly 150 popular websites and apps. Facebook’s privacy policy, for example, takes around 18 minutes to read in its entirety – slightly above average for the policies I tested.

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“You’re confused into thinking these are there to inform users, as opposed to protect companies,” said Albert Gidari, the consulting director of privacy at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society.

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According to Jen King, the director of consumer privacy at the Center for Internet and Society, this doesn’t mean we should throw out privacy policies entirely — we just need a fresh start.

“These are documents created by lawyers, for lawyers. They were never created as a consumer tool,” Dr. King said. “What would we do if we actually started over and did this from a human-centric point of view, knowing what we know now about how humans process information online?”

 

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