Undergrad Project Offers Site Privacy Information At a Glance

An anonymous reader writes "Not everyone can read legalese. Websites ought to have clearer, more transparent, and simpler privacy policies. One important step in this direction is a simple way of summarizing a privacy policy's features, to make it easy to see how a website will use and protect user data. Inspired by Creative Commons and the Mozilla Privacy Icon Project, we (a group of Yale undergrads) have designed a set of icons, as well as simple descriptions, to describe common features of privacy policies. Additionally, we have built a generator to make it easy for websites to add these icons to their own sites. To further encourage awareness, we have reviewed several popular websites' privacy policies, so that users can see for themselves how they fare." True to their word, the examples show some tiny but nicely scannable icons.

Accessibility?

[JustinRLynn]

Nice idea and I hope the implementation is well thought out -- designing pictograms that make sense to many cultures is difficult. The other usual concerns also apply -- speaking of which, one issue I see right off the bat is that they're using color as a sole designator in the icon set. For people with red/green color blindness, this makes the set of icons unusable for its intended purpose.

Re:Accessibility?

[FurtiveGlancer]

Addition of a diagonal cross bar to the red circle should suffice and matches accepted international symbology.

Another Approach

[martyb]

Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with this source in any way; just a very satisfied user.

Check out the free EULAlyzer which can be downloaded from: [javacoolsoftware.com]EULA Research Center [eularesearchcenter.com]. EULAlyzer works on Windows 2000, XP, 2003, Vista, and 7.

Example: I took a look at the Privacy Policy for /. which is located at: Geeknet Privacy Policy [geek.net] . "(Last Updated February 29, 2012) (Effective Date May 24, 2008)"

EULAyzer summarized as:

"Details: The license agreement above has a high calculated Interest ID. It's rather long, and there were a high number of detected 'interesting' words and phrases."

The "Flagged Text" Called out the following, each of which can be expanded:

• Advertising
• Privacy: ID Number
• Privacy: Web Bugs
• Promotional Messages
• Third Party
• Web Site Address
• Without Notice

Each of these are expandable. Each expanded item provides an "Interest Level" graph and a link to its place in the License Agreement Text.

PS: I've lurked on /. since before there even were UID numbers, but privacy concerns delayed my signing up. I'm quite frankly surprised at how extensive the policy is and that just shows me how much has changed since the olden days. I should probably check other on-line site's policies to see what's new there, too.