Website privacy policies take on average 10 minutes to read and sometimes run into thousands of words, researchers have found. While some are short, others would take over half an hour to read, researchers said.
Researchers Aleecia McDonald and Lorrie Faith Cranor of Carnegie Mellon University looked at online privacy policies and how long it would take to read them. While one policy they looked at was just 144 words long, they found one policy on a popular site that ran to 7,669 words, around 15 pages of text.
The average length of privacy policies used by the 75 most popular US websites is 2,500 words, the research found. Using the reading speed of 250 words per minute which is typical for those who have completed secondary education, the average policy would take 10 minutes to read.
The length of privacy policies is often cited as one reason they are so commonly ignored. "Studies show privacy policies are hard to read, read infrequently, and do not support rational decision making," said the researchers, acknowledging the fact that the policies are rarely read.
Though some people took under a minute and others up to 42 minutes, the bulk of the subjects of the research took between three and six minutes to skim the policy, which itself was just over a third of the size of the average policy.
The researchers used their data to estimate how much it costs US citizens to read the privacy policy of every site they visit once a year if their time was charged for. Were people to actually read the policies and charge for that time it would cost $652 billion a year.
Though that figure has limited usefulness, because people rarely read whole policies and cannot charge anyone for the time it takes to do this, the researchers concluded that readers who do conduct a cost-benefit analysis might decide not to read any policies.
"Preliminary work from a small pilot study in our laboratory revealed that some Internet users believe their only serious risk online is they may lose up to $50 if their credit card information is stolen. For people who think that is their primary risk, our point estimates show the value of their time to read policies far exceeds this risk. Even for our lower bound estimates of the value of time, it is not worth reading privacy policies though it may be worth skimming them," said the research. Continued on next page Tags: Privacy
Hot Topics

Office web is the latest addition to Microsoft's Office business suite and is set to be the company's most revolutionary version.

Microsoft's 14th version of its award winning, multi-billion dollar cash cow business suite, is the company's most ambitious to date.

Spotify is certainly one of the most popular online music websites in the world which is a feat for a service that was officially launched only in February 2009
Featured Content
- The New Voice of the CIO. 158 CIOs in midsized businesses across 31 countries reveal their insights and vision for enhancing
competitiveness over the next five years.
Download Document
Customer Case Studies
- How a wine wholesaler improved the flow of information
Download full case study
- The server that made an entire university smarter
Download full case study
Videos
Latest Tweets

Comments