Privacy policies and trust

Enjoying a quiet August at work? Well maybe it is time to catch up on your privacy policy reading.

According to a new report from Deloitte it would take 25 minutes for an average user to read and comprehend a standard privacy policy. Based on ONS estimations that the average user visits 75 new websites a year, that equates to 31 hours a year.

This isn’t the first time a survey has pointed to the sheer amount of time it would take a user to meaningfully read and assess what they are agreeing to. An American academic paper on the Cost of Reading Privacy Policies suggested it would take the average person 250 hours every year to actually read the privacy policies of all of the websites they visit. The researchers claimed this equated to a $781bn cost in US internet users’ time.

But as we all know, most of us simply don’t bother. The 2012 Global Internet User Survey suggests that only 16 per cent of users always read privacy policies and 12 per cent never do. And the breakdown of why people accept terms and conditions without reading clearly points to the length of the policies as the key issue with top reasons including:

• I don’t have the time to read them – 11%
• There are too many pages (terms of service, privacy, etc.) – 13%
• They are too long – 18%

Alongside this general disregard of privacy policies is a corresponding cynicism about how companies treat our data.

Today’s Deloitte survey – based on an Ipsos MORI poll of 2,006 people – reports that only 22 percent of consumers are confident companies do not sell on their personal details without their knowledge and only 24 per cent are confident that companies tell them how they use their personal data.

So we aren’t reading the policies – but we don’t believe companies are telling us how they use our data. Will users or companies blink first?