I’ve recently read Reading the Privacy Policies You Encounter in a Year Would Take 76 Work Days and was pretty shocked that it was that bad. So I thought how this could be improved.
Creative Commons licenses are nice, because they are modular:
- CC: Indicates that it is a creative commons license
- [-BY]: Attribution
- [-NC]: Non Commercial
- [-ND]: No Derivates
- [-SA]: Share Alike
I think one could eventually make such modular privacy policies. Eventually a tabular policy would be better:
- Received Information
- Information you provide to us: Name, Content, Transactional information, Location, Friends
- Collected information when you use the service: Site activity information, Access Device and Browser Information, Cookie Information
- Third Parties: …
- Usage of Information
- Manage Service
- Sell to third parties
- Contact you
…
Is there any attempt to create such a modular / structured (eventually machine-readable) privacy policy?
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The standard for handling privacy policies is called P3P. Part of P3P’s aim is to have machine-discoverable and -readable privacy policies, so browsers can check whether they fall within the user’s preferred bounds.
Other uses could include limiting web crawlers to only select data whose privacy policy allows this usage (eg. scraping blogs for a sociology experiment).