If you get into details, it can become complicated. But Robert Pitofsky, a lawyer for more than 50 years and chairman of the Federal Trade Commission, which monitors privacy online, says even he has difficulty. Pitofsky won't point fingers on the record, but examples aren't hard to find. A single sentence in the policy of HealthCentral, for instance, has 174 words. That can happen with as few as 30 words, he adds.
Most people rely on a few hundred words in the course of their day.
In a few weeks, the FTC will release the results of its second audit of Web privacy policies. The agency will look at how many sites have privacy policies, as it did in 1998. But for the first time, it also will look at how hard the policies are to understand. To provide a notice that most Americans cannot understand and argue that that is sufficient is utter nonsense. All of the sites analyzed have been involved in privacy controversies, and all but two were among the 20 most visited sites on the Web, according to Media Metrix.