A typical British family could need more than 10 working days simply to read the privacy policies and terms governing a single day of their digital life, according to new research.
The study, by Web3 Foundation, created model households in the UK and US and examined the privacy documents linked to the phones, televisions, wearables, banks, schools, cars, cameras and other systems encountered during an ordinary day.
1.2 million words in daily policies
For its model UK family, researchers identified 257 relevant policies, terms and notices containing almost 1.2 million words. Reading them would take around 83 hours, or 10.4 eight-hour working days.
That is about 34 per cent more text than the complete works of William Shakespeare, which contain roughly 885,000 words.
Data points from an ordinary day
The research found that two adults wearing smart devices could produce around 2,000 health readings a day. Two children were modelled as being captured around 100 times by school cameras and having 11,400 keystrokes logged during a school week.
Across school CCTV, streets, shops, a video doorbell and in-car cameras, the family could appear on camera between 90 and 260 times during a single modelled day.
Organisations and data use
Researchers examined the published documents of 143 organisations. Of these, 83 per cent described potential use of personal data for marketing or advertising, while 71 per cent described circumstances in which information could be shared with commercial partners.
At least 24 per cent had documents stating that users' data may be used to train or improve artificial intelligence or machine-learning systems.
Gavin Wood, founder of Web3 Foundation, said the exercise showed the difficulty consumers face when asked to make informed decisions about how their information is used.
“We did what consumers are told to do: we read the privacy policies,” he said, arguing that disclosure was of limited value if people had no realistic prospect of reading the material.
Implications for privacy
Across the study, the modern privacy problem may no longer be hidden small print. It is the sheer amount of small print required to explain what an ordinary day online can reveal.
A television can register what is on screen thousands of times, a wearable can generate a constant stream of health information and cameras can record the same person repeatedly as they move through a city.
The report says those separate data points can then potentially be combined or used to infer information about a person’s health, finances, movements, relationships, interests and behaviour.
For Web3 Foundation, its proposed answer is to redesign digital services so they demand less information in the first place, including allowing people to prove individual facts, such as their age, without repeatedly handing over entire identity documents or underlying datasets.
