Nobody reads privacy policies, senator wants lawmakers to stop pretending we do

Re:Nobody reads privacy policies, senator wants lawmakers to... by mijamo on Thursday June 18, 2020 @02:34PM (#23566142)

I don't really agree. Disclosure for drugs is comprehensive and short. You can usually read the whole thing in 10 minutes and I always do because taking a new drug and I know many who do. For investor relation, real estate and such the value is such that those are also read, usually by multiple eyes. And most software user agréments are actually much larger and harder to understand than the real estate papers worth millions I've seen, or even shareholder agreements worth even more.

Contrary to what you think it is very possible to have short legal agreements. The GDPR data policy basic template is quite comprehensive and rather short for instance, although it could get better. We could also imagine some informative shortened version with icons and standardized information in the same way you have for food components or drug warnings, or crucially apps permissions nowadays, that would cover 95% of the legalese in the user agreements.

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Re:Nobody reads privacy policies, senator wants lawmakers to... by nickff on Thursday June 18, 2020 @02:39PM (#23566194)

Apparently the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States disagrees with you on the length of drug disclosures.[1] He said that "[p]roviding too much information defeats the purpose of disclosure, and since no one reads it", and that "the legal system obviously is to blame for that".

[1] https://www.abajournal.com/news/article/chief_justice_robert...

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Re:Nobody reads privacy policies, senator wants lawmakers to... by btilly on Thursday June 18, 2020 @03:24PM (#23566743)

As I commented elsewhere, all that it would take to fix this is a precedent or law saying that, "Any consumer contract with a Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level of over 8 shall be unenforceable because the average consumer cannot be expected to have understood what they were agreeing to."

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Re:Nobody reads privacy policies, senator wants lawmakers to... by nickff on Thursday June 18, 2020 @04:47PM (#23567835)

You're really begging the question here. Why should we all follow your whim? Is there any reason at all, other than that it makes sense to you?

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Re:Nobody reads privacy policies, senator wants lawmakers to... by btilly on Thursday June 18, 2020 @05:13PM (#23568112)

Yes, there is a very clear reason. I've stated it elsewhere but I will state it again.

Under common law, there is no legal contract without a meeting of minds. There can be no meeting of minds without comprehension. Per studies of reading abilities, only 2% of Americans read at a college level. (See https://www.wyliecomm.com/2019/03/us-literacy-rate/ for a source.) Therefore such contracts should not be legally enforceable on the other 98% of Americans.

This reasoning applies only to contracts where members of the general public were expected to review the contract unassisted. By contrast in a business contract where both sides retained legal counsel, the complexity of the language is not prima facie evidence that the contract was unlikely to be understood.

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Re:Nobody reads privacy policies, senator wants lawmakers to... by SkyBelow on Thursday June 18, 2020 @05:08PM (#23568062)

Because people generally find that informed consent is the only consent that counts. If someone cannot read a contract, how can they give informed consent to it?

If we decide that uninformed consent is still consent, we open a significant problem. And if we try to patch it by selectively applying the standard, we introduce arbitrariness which is an even larger problem.

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Re:Nobody reads privacy policies, senator wants lawmakers to... by gowld on Thursday June 18, 2020 @07:55PM (#23569497)

The GDPR has been a subject of constant dispute since it was born. Not a great example.

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