Privacy Icons

	Privacy Icons Project
	Owner: Ben Moskowitz	Updated: 2011-06-15
	“A bolt-on approach to simplifying privacy policies.”

The Icons

Retention period			1.jpg	1.jpg
Legal short notice: PrivacyIcons/Retention period Short notice owner: Nobody
Your data is deleted before 1, 3, 6, or 18 months from the date of transmission have elapsed, respectively. Alternately, your data is stored indefinitely unless you opt-out.

Third-party use			1.jpg	1.jpg
Legal short notice: PrivacyIcons/Third-party use Short notice owner: Nobody
Your data is deleted before 1, 3, 6, or 18 months from the date of transmission have elapsed, respectively. Alternately, your data is stored indefinitely unless you opt-out.

Ad networks			1.jpg	1.jpg
Legal short notice: PrivacyIcons/Ad networks Short notice owner: Nobody
Your data is deleted before 1, 3, 6, or 18 months from the date of transmission have elapsed, respectively. Alternately, your data is stored indefinitely unless you opt-out.

Law enforcement			1.jpg	1.jpg
Legal short notice: PrivacyIcons/Law enforcement Short notice owner: Nobody
Your data is deleted before 1, 3, 6, or 18 months from the date of transmission have elapsed, respectively. Alternately, your data is stored indefinitely unless you opt-out.

Background

The problem: users need to know how companies intend to use their data—but privacy policies and terms of service are long-winded, complex documents that encapsulate a lot of situation-specific detail.

The solution: a set of Privacy Icons to “bolt on to” your existing privacy policy. When you add a Privacy Icon to your privacy policy, you’re essentially saying: “No matter what the rest of this privacy policy says, the following is true and preempts anything else in this document.”

Each Privacy Icon makes an iron-clad guarantee about what a company will do with a user’s data. Now, people can understand how their personal data will be transacted, with just a glance. At the same time, companies retain the flexibility needed to create comprehensive, detailed, and meaningful policies.

Privacy Icons are legal declarations, written in cooperation with privacy experts and a coalition of industry stakeholders. And soon, they will be machine readable—enabling users to communicate their preferences through trusted agents (like web browsers).

Who Are They For?

For any sites that store user data—blogs, email lists, e-commerce sites, advertisers, and social networks—Privacy Icons are a competitive differentiator. Adopting Privacy Icons for your site signals your respect for user choice and control, and doing business transparently.

There’s an emerging marketplace for personal data, where users exchange information about themselves for online goods and services. But personal data is a currency whose exchange rate is unknown. As users begin to understand the value of their data, the market will reward companies who treat their users transparently and with respect. Over time, the fair value of these exchanges will emerge, and companies who appreciate their customers’ privacy will be rewarded.

Differentiation based on privacy matters to users. Think about the large number of sites which vehemently promise to never share your email address when you sign up for their service or mailing list. Those are the kinds of sites, which make up a significant fraction of the web, that should adopt Privacy Icons.

For users who voluntarily share personal data, Privacy Icons are the quickest way to understand the terms by which they offer information about themselves. They help users make informed choices about whether to share their data.

Privacy policies are long legalese documents that obfuscate meaning. Nobody reads them because they are indecipherable and obtuse. Yet, these are the documents that tell you what’s going on with your data — how, when, and by whom your information will used. To put it another way, the privacy policy lets you know if some company can make money from information (like selling you email to a spammer).

Following in the footsteps of Creative Commons’ footsteps—which used simple visual language to make copyright more understandable—we need to reduce the complexity of privacy policies to an indicator scannable in seconds. Privacy Icons provide a visual language for delving deeper into how our data is used.