Privacy policies are long legalese documents that obfuscate meaning. Nobody reads them because they are indecipherable and obtuse. Yet, these are the documents that tell you what’s going on with your data — how, when, and by whom your information will used. To put it another way, the privacy policy lets you know if some company can make money from information (like selling you email to a spammer).

Creative Commons did an amazing thing for copyright law. It made it understandable.

Creative commons reduced the complexity of letting others use your work with a set of combinable, modular icons.

In order for privacy policies to have meaning for actual people, we need to follow in Creative Commons footsteps. We need to reduce the complexity of privacy policies to an indicator scannable in seconds. At the same time, we need a visual language for delving deeper into how our data is used—a set of icons may not be enough to paint the rich picture of where you data is going.

Understanding Data Flows

With the rise of web services, your information can end up in unexpected places. To get a better understanding of some of the complexities of data flow, we sketch out how Anti-phishing works in Firefox (with help from Oliver Reichenstein).

Here’s what that looks like as a wall of text, which is the typical privacy policy mode.

The difference in understandability is huge between the text and the schematic. In fact, while we were working on creating this infographic we found a hole in our legalese and updated it accordingly.

The idea here is that by creating a visual schematic language, it is relatively painless way for a company to convert their wall-of-text into something a bit more approachable. And that the more visualization actually shines a light into the dense tangle of words, possibly highlighting flaws or trouble spots that would have otherwise remained hidden.

The simple form

The visual schematic language is a descriptive way of explaining a privacy policy and helps us to understand what’s going on underneath the hood. It doesn’t solve the problem of being able to quickly figure out the guarantees a privacy policy is making on your data.

For that, we want to move from the descriptive to the proscriptive, to a set of legally-bindings icons like Creative Commons.

As an experiment, we tried a schematic form of icons:

The feedback that we’ve got so far is that the schematic is over-kill and that a set of icons more similar to Creative Commons’s would be easier to scan and understand. The next step is for us to come up with a set of orthogonal decisions about what compromises the most important aspects of a privacy policy. In the end, we probably shouldn’t have more than 5 icons in the interest of simplicity.

You can help us brainstorm them.

For now here are a set of axis we’ve come up with that need to be whittled down:

Is your information…

Shared with a 3rd Party? Shared internally within the company?
Anonymized/Aggregated before being stored or used?
Personally Identifiable?
Stored for more than x number of days?
Encrypted on the server?
Monetized (sold) in some way?
Usable to contact you?