Anna Lenhert- Annotated Bibliography

• Mcdonald, A.M. and Cranor, O.F. The Cost of Reading Privacy Policies. I/S: A Journal of Law and Policy for the Information Society 4 (2008), 543–565.
  • The basic question that these researchers are asking is “What is the cost to users, in terms of time, to read privacy policies?” Their thesis is that addressing this issue from the perspective of economics would be more productive than just legislation.  For one group, they calculated the average length of TOS agreements, and assumed a reading rate of 250 words/minute to get to a conclusion of an average length of 10 minutes per policy. They then translated this time into a dollar value; “we estimated the value of time as 25% of average hourly salary for leisure and twice wages for time at work.” For a second group, they aimed to show that not only is the time demand for users to be informed unreasonable, but even if they skim they cannot accurately answer basic comprehension questions. They conclude, “Finally, some corporations take the view that their users should read privacy policies and if they fail to do so, it is evidence of lack of concern about privacy. Instead, we counter that websites need to do a better job of conveying their practices in useable ways, which includes reducing the time it takes to read policies.”
     
• Madrigal, Alex C. “Reading the Privacy Policies You Encounter in a Year Would Take 76 Work Days” The Atlantic. March 1, 2012. http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/03/reading-the-privacy-policies-you-encounter-in-a-year-would-take-76-work-days/253851/  *
  • Brief summary of McDonald, Cranor
• Rosenthal, Elizabeth. “I Disclose…Nothing” The New York Times. January 21, 2012. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/sunday-review/hard-truths-about-disclosure.html?_r=0
   
• Singer, Natasha. “Didn’t Read Those Terms of Service? Here’s What You Agreed to Give Up.” The New York Times. April 28, 2014. http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/04/28/didnt-read-those-terms-of-service-heres-what-you-agreed-to-give-up/
   
   
• Terms of Service; Didn’t Read, https://tosdr.org
   
• Bayley, Ed. “The Clicks that Bind: Ways users ‘agree’ to Online Terms of Service.”  Electronic Frontier Foundation. https://www.eff.org/wp/clicks-bind-ways-users-agree-online-terms-service