A comparative study of online privacy policies and formats

Abstract. Online privacy policies are difficult to understand. Most privacy policies require a college reading level and an ability to decode legalistic, confusing, or jargon-laden phrases. Privacy researchers and industry groups have devised several standardized privacy policy formats to address these issues and help people compare policies. We evaluated three formats in this paper: layered policies, which present a short form with standardized components in addition to a full policy; the Privacy Finder privacy report, which standardizes the text descriptions of privacy practices in a brief bulleted format; and conventional non-standardized human-readable policies. We contrasted six companies’ policies, deliberately selected to span the range from unusually readable to challenging. Based on the results of our online study of 749 Internet users, we found participants were not able to reliably understand companies’ privacy practices with any of the formats. Compared to natural langu...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: SOUPS
• Authors: Aleecia M. McDonald, Robert W. Reeder, Patrick Gage Kelley, Lorrie Faith Cranor
• Keywords: Online Privacy Policies, Privacy, Privacy Policies, Security Privacy, SOUPS 2009