In preparing for a research study that Keynote is undertaking to look at User Experience and Mobile Privacy, I ran across a recent piece posted on The Atlantic website discussing the challenge of effective privacy disclosures:
One simple answer to our privacy problems would be if everyone became maximally informed about how much data was being kept and sold about them. Logically, to do so, you'd have to read all the privacy policies on the websites you visit. A few years ago, two researchers, both then at Carnegie Mellon, decided to calculate how much time it would take to actually read every privacy policy you should.
After calculating the length and complexity of the documents, renowned privacy researcher Lorrie Cranor and her colleague Aleecia McDonald determined that if you stopped to read the privacy policies of every web site that the average user visits during the course of their online travels, it would take an average of 76 days!
In looking more deeply at this issue, it's clear that delivering effective disclosures to consumers is hard, with yet more complications arising when you factor in the prevalence of mobile devices. Despite high resolution screens, it can still be difficult to read detailed and lengthy documents on small form-factor devices. Yet the disclosures are even more essential when you figure the ways in which mobile apps are increasingly leveraging your private information, location information, mobile payments activities, and social networking connections.
Here at Keynote, we're leveraging our market-leading expertise in user experience and performance monitoring to look at how companies can improve transparency and deliver great mobile experiences that fit into consumers' expectations at all levels. Stay tuned for the results of our Mobile Privacy research project, which we hope to unveil at the FTC Mobile Privacy Disclosures workshop later this month. And we promise... it won't take 76 days to read our findings!
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