Reading the Privacy Policies You Encounter in a Year Would Take 76 Work Days

Privacy policies are not something I am intimately familiar with, but this seems like a problem that could be solved in a similar way to licensing open source software.<p>When I look at using a piece of software I quickly jump to the license, if it is BSD or similar I typically jump right in. I don't even have to read the terms because I know the BSD license. I would love to have a similar system for privacy licensing on various online services. Is there anything like this out there?<p>Seems like it would not be very hard.

I'd like to see the numbers for licenses in general (and particularly accounting for how often various sites' licenses <i>change</i>). I've written before[0] about how Apple's iTMS policy is long and frequently updated and that they clearly have no expectation that you'll actually read it or even be able to.<p>[0] <a href="http://www.blahedo.org/blog/archives/001060.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.blahedo.org/blog/archives/001060.html</a>

That's a ridiculous statistic purely contrived for a sensational headline. If you want to a more reasonable measure than you should count the number of sites where users are giving personally identifiable information. Those are the sites where policies should be read and that will be a much smaller number.<p>Given that, I do think privacy policies can be more concise, but that likely won't happen with out some sort of tort reform. Policies are long because businesses need to cover all of their bases in a litigious society.

Have these been tested in court?<p>I am waiting for a site that puts clauses like "10% of your income belongs to us" in their clickthrough one day.