The Hidden Power of the Privacy Policy, the Text We All Ignore

As the Evernote saga recently showed, there are quite a few reasons for a privacy policy to exist, and one of those is that it helps the public know when the apps they use are breaking the contract between the company and the end user. But what if that contract just wasn’t there at all? Turns out that this is a more common situation than you’d think, in part due to lax detection and oversight.

In Nov, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University cranked up this discussion by analyzing 18,000 Android apps in Google’s Play store. Roughly half of the apps studied didn’t have privacy policies at all, despite the fact that more than two thirds of apps (71 percent) used some form of personally identifiable information on the part of the user.