Erik I

Warning: this post contains silliness.

Warning 2: the silliness in this post is meant to highlight the even biggier silliness of privacy policies that are impossible for the target audience to read and offers next to no protection outside of what the mandates, if not less.

Recently New York Times pointed out how long many privacy policies have gotten. While they are still not as long as “War and Peace” a number of them are already more complex than “A Brief History of Time”.

So here are a couple of examples of what privacy policies could look like if companies wanted people to actually understand them: )

Privacy policy for A Big Social Network site:

We will collect any data we can get on you, including but not limited to:

• where you live
• who your friends are
• what we can infer by data mining your posts and your friends posts
• anything we can infer from the photo sharing service we also bought as well as metadata from the e2e encrypted messaging services we run.

We will not care if it is correct or not.

We will happily sell, leak or give this data away to anyone that will pay us or otherwise do us a favour.

We will also be happy to sell all kinds of services based on your data, including but not linited to targeted ads.

From time to time we might also run large scale psycologival experiments on our users. We may or may not tell you about this later.

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Privacy policy for Giant Ad Network with attached Search Engine

We will use any and all data we can collect on you, including but not limited to
– your mail
– your search history
– your browsing history
– your purchase history (if we
– your dns queries
– anything else we can get our hands on

We promise to protect this raw data to the best of our ability.

We will however happily use it to sell services based on the data, including but not limited to ad placements and census data.