Price of Facebook Privacy? Start Clicking

The US Constitution is unusually short because it's written on the principle of English common law. In traditional common law, the written law is very short and very general. Then, as complications come up, the courts interpret it and precedent is applied. This is opposed to more statutory systems where you try to write a law as specifically as possible and the courts don't have as much power to decide "case law".

Another famous example of common law is "The Laws of the Game", the official rulebook of association football (soccer): http://www.fifa.com/mm/document/affederation/federation/81/4...

44 pages of the document are the rules themselves (17 rules), there's about 3 pages of addendum, and then over 50 pages of summarized interpretation (the equivalent of case law). The pages themselves are not very dense.

My right arm is longer than my left foot.

I'm really not sure how this is a logical comparison in anything other than a link-bait case.

The click-through licenses on some freemium apps I've used are also longer than than the Constitution, yet shorter than War and Peace.

I would expect most modern legal-ese documents that define restrictions and allowances related to privacy to be longer than 200 year old documents designed to grant basic freedoms and allowances to society. Especially when you consider that the US Constitution holds the distinction of being the shortest such document of any modern nation with a Constitution.

For a relevant comparison: every bill Congress passes is hundreds of times longer than the Constitution. How does that make you feel?

Don't miss the article's infographic, "A Bewildering Tangle of Options" on the complexity of the privacy options panels. http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/05/12/business/faceb...

There was a bit this week on "The Daily Show" that chided the British for not writing down their Constitution. But the British version is lower-case: their government has a constitution, not a Constitution. And that's the original meaning, constitution being an English word meaning "the composition of something".

Clearly, the U.S. Constitution bears little resemblance to the U.S. Government's constitution. How long would USG's actual constitution be if you wrote it down? Let's just say it would be a wee bit longer than Facebook's privacy policy.

I find it interesting how short Flickr's policy is in relation to the others. Especially since Flickr would seem to have more intellectual property.

I assume that is because of their use of existing copyleft license options for photos.

And it is considerably more subject to amendment.

It also hopefully will not require 220+ and counting years of jurisprudence for its true meaning to be divined.