Industry Tries to Streamline Privacy Policies for Mobile Users

For many Internet users, online privacy policies are long and difficult to read. Transfer those same policies to a mobile device, where users can find themselves clicking through multiple screens often with tiny type, and the policies can become almost useless to the average consumer. Yet those same policies govern how much user data is collected through mobile applications and how that data is shared with advertisers and other third parties. And with growing concern over data collection, including proposed legislation to more closely protect consumers, one company is trying to make privacy policies that are both easy for consumers to read and easy for mobile application developers to create.

“Everybody complains that no one reads privacy policies and that privacy policies are too long and too difficult,” said Jim Brock, the founder of PrivacyChoice, a company that has analyzed and indexed the data in hundreds of privacy policies across the Web. “The mobile environment requires you to say things very succinctly, and it requires you to say things in layers.” Using the data collected from hundreds of online privacy policies, Brock and his team devised a tool to help mobile application developers create basic policies without the help of a lawyer. Developers who want to use the tool can select answers to basic questions about how they collect data, how that data is used and whether it can be deleted. The resulting policy boils complicated policy language down to a few sentences like “We collect or share your location only with your permission” or “We keep personal data until you delete it.”