It seems like anytime a big e-commerce company revises its privacy policy it stirs up a lot of outrage, especially if the change is perceived as anti-consumer. The recent change at auction site eBay was no exception.
eBay later modified some of its changes after online privacy advocate Junkbusters.com asked the Federal Trade Commission to investigate.
In the course of working on these stories I was required to read through quite a bit of what one might call "obfuscatory" prose. Much of it apparently was crafted by lawyers fluent in legalese but with only a passing knowledge of "English as she is spoke."
So I was pretty interested when I heard from readability consultant Mark Hochhauser in Minnesota, who advised me that eBay's new privacy policy and user agreement together are about 7,800 words — the equivalent of about 31 pages of double-spaced text.
That would be a daunting read, even if it was all printed out and you could settle down with it in an easy chair. Frankly, I'd rather have my legs waxed.
Hochhauser told me that eBay's new privacy policy has 146 sentences, with an average of 25 words per sentence.
On his scale of reference, it scored as follows:
Reading level: About third year college
Sentence Complexity: 82 (100 is most complex)
Vocabulary Complexity: 53 (100 is most complex)
The User Agreement was even worse, 133 sentences with an average of 29 words per sentence. The reading level came in about the fourth year of college.
Turns out that Hochhauser uses several software programs to analyze prose. He said that "I clean the files first, taking out all extra periods from abbreviations, because the software counts a sentence very time it finds a period. I try to run as much of the file as I can, using just complete sentences — no bullet points, titles, etc. I've got about a dozen software programs that I can use, but I usually rely on 'Prose,' 'Correct Grammar' (and/or) 'Grammatik 6.0.'
Just for fun I asked him to run similar tests on the privacy policies of Amazon.com, Yahoo! and InternetNews.com, where I work. Here's what he found:
Amazon.com Privacy Policy
1,802 words
73 sentences — 24 words per sentence
Reading Grade Level: 2nd year college
Sentence Complexity: 74 (100 is very complex)
Vocabulary Complexity: 54 (100 is very complex)
Yahoo! Privacy Policy
755 words
33 sentences — 22 words per sentence
Reading Grade Level — 15 (3rd year college)
Sentence Complexity: 52 (100 is very complex)
Vocabulary Complexity: 42 (100 is very complex)
Internet News Privacy Policy
1,700 words
83 sentences — 20 words per sentence
Reading Grade level: 13 (1st year college)
Sentence Complexity: 50 (100 is very complex)
Vocabulary Complexity: 39 (100 is very complex)
"You can say you have a privacy policy, but if no one understands it, it's pointless," Hochhauser has said. "It does something for the organization, but nothing for the consumer."
I asked him what he makes of the readability figures and in an e-mail exchange he told me that his take on the findings is that "...the privacy notices are still too long and too complicated for most people to understand. The most recent census data shows that about 85 percent of adults have a high school diploma, and about 25 percent have a college degree."
"I think that Web sites have to decide whether they want legal precision (which most consumers won't understand) but that they think will protect them, or if they want to be understood (which their lawyers may argue against) because they may believe that 'plain language' will open them up to ... lawsuits," Hochhauser said.
His view, incidentally, is that in practice it might work just the other way around.
"People may be less likely to sue if they understand what the Web site is doing with their personal information, and more likely to sue if they don't understand the privacy policy," he said. "The problem isn't just that these documents seem to be written by lawyers, but they're written by lawyers who don't write in plain English."
But hey, that's nothing new, it goes back to the Founding Fathers, whose obfuscation prompted H.L. Mencken's tongue-in-cheek revision of the Declaration of Independence, which starts like this:
"When things get so balled up that the people of a country have to cut loose from some other country, and go it on their own hook, without asking no permission from nobody, excepting maybe God Almighty, then they ought to let everybody know why they done it, so that everybody can see they are on the level, and not trying to put nothing over on nobody."
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