Friday, March 2, 2012

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

Madrigal, Alexis. "Reading the Privacy Policies You Encounter in a Year Would Take 76 Work Days." The Atlantic, March 1, 2012.

From the article: "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. …So, each and every Internet user, were they to read every privacy policy on every website they visit would spend 25 days out of the year just reading privacy policies! If it was your job to read privacy policies for 8 hours per day, it would take you 76 work days to complete the task. Nationalized, that's 53.8 BILLION HOURS of time required to read privacy policies." Read more