Privacy Policies are Long, redux

Geoffrey A. Fowler for the Washington Post:

Facebook . . . last week rewrote its infamous privacy policy to a secondary-school reading level — but also tripled its length to 12,000 words. The deeper I dug into them, the clearer it became that understandability isn’t our biggest privacy problem. Being overwhelmed is.

We the users shouldn’t be expected to read and consent to privacy policies. Instead, let’s use the law and technology to give us real privacy choices. And there are some very good ideas for how that could happen.

I tried to read all my app privacy policies. It was 1 million words.

Proposed solution is something like a privacy nutrition label. Or maybe machine readable privacy disclosures that enable automated decision making by a user’s client (e.g., phone or browser).