The Atlantic's Alexis Madrigal recently reminded us of a Carnegie Mellon study which found that if you read every privacy policy on every website you encounter throughout the year, it would take you 76 work days.
Life is literally too short to read privacy policies.
This may be the one obvious win for Google users, seeing as the search giant just unified the more than 70 privacy policies across its many products. Digital rights advocates note that Google now has a more complete dossier on you to sell to its marketers, and hand over to the feds, should they ask. But think of the savings!
As Madrigal points out, here's how the cost of privacy breaks down:
- Median length of a privacy policy: 2,518 words
- Average time to read that policy: 10 minutes
- Number of privacy policies you encounter in a year: about 1,462
- Number of work days it would take to read those: 76
- Number of hours it would take U.S. users to read them: 53.8 billion
- Hypothetical national cost of reading privacy policies: $781 billion.
Of course, this study is from 2008, long before Google's unification. And of course, you've got to budget for inflation as well. Still, it's worth reviewing the price of policies. Check out Madrigal's review of the study here.
Helen A.S. Popkin goes blah blah blah about Internet privacy, and then asks you to follow her on Twitter and/or Facebook. Also, Google+. Because that's how she rolls.
