Building an Iconography for Digital Privacy

Web site privacy policies are usually long, vague and notoriously neglected by most of us. Or as Alex Fowler, chief privacy officer at Mozilla, put it, “We have long upheld that privacy policies suck.” Now, an experiment is under way to make those privacy policies somewhat more palatable.

The idea is to have lawyers and coders muddle through thousands of words of legalese and distill their meaning into a set of graphic icons. In effect, the pros will read those notoriously unreadable policies, so the rest of us don’t have to. The experiment began Nov 16 in Mozilla headquarters in San Francisco, under aptly dark clouds overhead. It was fueled by chicken-and-bacon sandwiches supplied by disconnect.me, a start-up that offers Web users tools to control how and with whom their personal data is shared. The assignment was to vet the policies of 1,000 Web sites.