Privacy Notice Informativeness: in a Search for Benchmark

The term transparency in the disciplines of information management, business ethics and information ethics is commonly used for forms of information visibility and access to information, with the aim of reducing information asymmetry among stakeholders. The principle of transparency is also one of the main mechanisms in data protection and regarding regulations, such as General Data Protection Regulation. But requirements for assesing it’s functionality are somewhat ambiguus and hard to evaluate. One of proposed metrics can be the amount of information the transparency mechanism is trying to convey. The basic (ex ante) tool of transparency is the publication of privacy notices, with the purpose of informing the individuals about the procedures related to the collection, sharing, use and storage of their personal data. By using lexical density as a metric to evaluate how much information there is in privacy statements of two major IT companies, Google and Microsoft, across five languages (Croatian, English, German, French, Italian) and comparison within set and generic sections of privacy notice, the aim of this paper is to identify reference scale for this, specific legal documents, between descriptive and explanatory narrative.