Is Privacy Policy Language Irrelevant to Consumers?
通过两项实验，让美国民众阅读Facebook、雅虎和谷歌的隐私政策片段，发现无论政策语言模糊还是明确，消费者对是否授权公司收集使用个人信息的判断没有差异，且普遍认为同意即授权，尽管他们觉得这些做法具有侵扰性。
This article reports the results of two experiments in which large, census-weighted samples of Americans read short excerpts from Facebook’s, Yahoo’s, and Google’s privacy policies, which are at issue in high-stakes privacy class-action lawsuits. Subjects were randomly assigned to read language from either vague policies, some of which had been adjudicated insufficient to notify consumers about the companies’ practices, or explicit policies. Though many experimental subjects read these privacy policy excerpts closely, subjects who saw the explicit policies did not differ from those who saw vague policies in their assessment of whether their assent to the policies would permit the corporate practices at issue. Subjects generally stated that agreement to either vague or explicit language authorized companies to collect or use their personal information, even though consumers regarded these corporate practices as intrusive. These experiments show that courts and laypeople can understand the same privacy policy language quite differently.