Textured agreements

Kay, Matthew; Terry, Michael

doi:10.1145/1572532.1572574

“…Not surprisingly, many of these studies find that consumers do not pay much attention to online privacy notices (Jensen and Potts 2004; Jensen, Potts, and Jensen 2005). Furthermore, consumers spend only about one‐fifth of the estimated required reading time when they do read notices (Grossklags and Good 2007; Kay and Terry 2009). Shorter summaries of information or layered notices get mixed results (Good et al 2005; McDonald et al 2009; Proctor, Ali, and Vu 2008).…”

Section: Previous Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

Designing Evidence‐based Disclosures: A Case Study of Financial Privacy Notices

Garrison¹,

Hastak

²

,

Hogarth³

et al. 2012

Journal of Consumer Affairs

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Disclosure is a key component of consumer protection policy. By informing consumers about a product or service, disclosures can help consumers understand product features and shop among products and providers to find the combination of features and price that best meets their needs. For example, the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA, 15 U.S.C. 6801-6809) provides for disclosures of information-sharing practices of financial institutions and, in some cases, requires that these institutions offer consumers the opportunity to limit some of this sharing. Using these disclosures as a case study, this paper explores how research can help policymakers shift from a perspective of developing disclosures that are in technical compliance with the law to one of developing disclosures that consumers pay attention to, understand and use in their decision making.

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A Comparative Study of Online Privacy Policies and Formats

McDonald

¹

,

Reeder

²

,

Kelley

³

et al. 2009

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

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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 company's privacy practices with any of the formats. Compared to natural language, participants were faster with standardized formats but at the expense of accuracy for layered policies. Privacy finder formats supported accuracy more than natural language for harder questions. Improved readability scores did not translate to improved performance. All formats and policies were similarly disliked. We discuss our findings as well as public policy implications.

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A comparative study of online privacy policies and formats

McDonald¹,

Reeder²,

Kelley³

et al. 2009

Proceedings of the 5th Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security

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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 company's privacy practices with any of the formats. Compared to natural language, participants were faster with standardized formats but at the expense of accuracy for layered policies. Privacy finder formats supported accuracy more than natural language for harder questions. Improved readability scores did not translate to improved performance. All formats and policies were similarly disliked. We discuss our findings as well as public policy implications.

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Textured agreements

Cited by 6 publications

References 22 publications

Designing Evidence‐based Disclosures: A Case Study of Financial Privacy Notices

Designing Evidence‐based Disclosures: A Case Study of Financial Privacy Notices

A Comparative Study of Online Privacy Policies and Formats

A comparative study of online privacy policies and formats

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