The best privacy policy I've ever read

Same here - it was entertaining for a few seconds, but actually reading through this - both because of the format and the styling of the page - is incredibly tedious.

One of the best privacy policy's I've ever read is for tildes.net: https://docs.tildes.net/privacy-policy

It's written and organized very clearly, and, most importantly, views user data as a liability instead of an asset.

A few snippets:

  Except when making a donation, third-party assets or scripts are never included on Tildes. Outside of those specific donation pages, using the site involves communicating exclusively with our servers.

  All personal information logged this way is deleted in 30 days unless: [legal obligations/TOS violations]

  Your information is used exclusively to operate Tildes. This includes providing the functionality of the site, analyzing usage, troubleshooting site issues, and investigating abuse. We never sell your information and Tildes does not have advertising.

  Tildes does not alter its behavior based on whether your browser sends a Do Not Track (DNT) header or not.

(it doesn't need to, it already doesn't track you)

You aren't alone. It was awful.

I think it's the kind of thing that could work rather well on some sites and terribly on others. For example, a site about a wacky, humourous game/TV show/film/whatever could integrate something like this into the 'universe' of the work, and have it read out by one of the characters. The site for the next Donkey Kong Country game could have its privacy policy written like Cranky Kong's cynical comments in the instruction manual, a site for Banjo-Kazooie or Yooka-Laylee could have the snarky side kick reading out the privacy policy, and I think it'd be the right tone for my Wario series fan site/forum's privacy policy too.

At the same time though, this would horribly inappropriate/annoying for a 'serious' company like a bank or financial institution, and go down poorly for someone everyone hates like Google or Facebook.

It's all about context really. Sometimes something like this may work well, sometimes it wouldn't. What'd work for Rare wouldn't work for Comcast and vice versa.

I agree.

The policy would probably even be illegal within the EU because of that. At least in Germany, courts regularly require privacy policies to be short and clear, and all that humor basically obfuscates the real policy.

TBH, I find it a bit 'wall of texty'. I'd personally prefer it to be more concise, and perhaps use bullet points to highlight the main points in each section.