Final Project: Privacy, Simplified – by “MNQ”

Not everyone can read legalese. Websites ought to have clearer, more transparent, and simpler privacy policies.

One important step in this direction is a simple way of summarizing a privacy policy’s features, to make it easy to see how a website will use and protect user data.

Enter Privacy Simplified.

Inspired by Creative Commons and the Mozilla Privacy Icon Project, for our final project we have designed a set of icons, as well as simple descriptions, to describe common features of privacy policies.

Additionally, we have built a generator to make it easy for websites to add these icons to their own sites. To further encourage awareness, we have reviewed several popular websites’ privacy policies, so that users can see for themselves how they fare, including Google, Facebook, Spotify, Netflix, and even Yale, among others.

We hope that this will prove useful, and both empower users to really think about the kinds of services they use, as well as encourage the development of a Creative Commons-like standard for describing privacy features, confusions, and pitfalls.

Thanks,
Paulina Haduong
Machisté N. Quintana
Anthony Tordillos

UPDATE: Featured on Boing Boing, Macleans, the Creative Commons wiki, and the Yale Facebook page! This is all unexpected, but awesome.