“Why Should I Read the Privacy Policy, I Just Need the Service”: A Study on Attitudes and Perceptions Toward Privacy Policies

Online service providers are aggressively evolving the digital systems around us into surveillance platforms. From voice assistants that listen to every conversation, to apps that share sensitive location information, privacy experts have raised concerns about how such data is being abused. This comes at a time when advertisement campaigns can target users through social media platforms according to political party affiliations, reproductive health, and even religious beliefs. Such behavior raises concerns about how service providers leverage privacy policies to legitimately appropriate private data. In this work, we examine the user attitudes and perceptions towards privacy policies. We analyze user perceptions based on data collected from 655 participants. We use this information to identify different motivators and blockers that can influence the user’s willingness towards reading privacy policies. We also examine the impact of previous user experiences such as cyber-attacks, as well as, online data sharing practices on reading such policies. Furthermore, we evaluate the ability of users to comprehend the content presented in privacy policies and the impact technical jargon has on the readability of such documents. Our study reveals that although less than 19% of our participants reported having some difficulty in understanding privacy policies, our study shows that more than half of the participants did not understand the content. Finally, we evaluate the implication of using different interfaces for conveying privacy policy content. We use this information to extract various pain points that could be used to assist researchers in improving the usability of privacy policies.