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Comment by lmkg | Hacker News Reader

> These are documents created by lawyers, for lawyers. They were never created as a consumer tool

This, I think, is the core issue. The Privacy Policy is seen as the same type of thing as the Terms of Service. Of course, this begs the question of why does there need to be two different documents.

GDPR has pretty explicitly tried to reverse this. The Terms of Service can be as legal-y as you want, but there must be a plain-language Privacy Policy for the data subject. We'll see how much that happens in practice... the regulators probably have much bigger fish to fry than unclear PP documents, but a fine for a separate issue could include "no one could understand this, so it doesn't count" as a way to side-step technical loopholes.

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More importantly GDPR grants statutory rights that cannot be waived by a shrinkwrap agreement. Its only real weakness is that is does not grant a right of private enforcement, and national regulatory agencies are too understaffed to address even a small portion of abuses today.

> Its only real weakness is that is does not grant a right of private enforcement, and national regulatory agencies are too understaffed to address even a small portion of abuses today

Article 79, Right to an effective judicial remedy against a controller or processor

1. Without prejudice to any available administrative or non-judicial remedy, including the right to lodge a complaint with a supervisory authority pursuant to Article 77, each data subject shall have the right to an effective judicial remedy where he or she considers that his or her rights under this Regulation have been infringed as a result of the processing of his or her personal data in non-compliance with this Regulation.

2. Proceedings against a controller or a processor shall be brought before the courts of the Member State where the controller or processor has an establishment. Alternatively, such proceedings may be brought before the courts of the Member State where the data subject has his or her habitual residence, unless the controller or processor is a public authority of a Member State acting in the exercise of its public powers.

Non waivable rights are pretty common in european law, both of member states aswell as union law itself.

> "no one could understand this, so it doesn't count" as a way to side-step technical loopholes.

In fact, the GDPR explicitly says any declaration that isn't intelligible and using clear and plain language "shall not be binding". Which means the service doesn't actually have consent.

Companies that think of their Privacy Policy as a “Legal” or “Compliance” function will have their lawyers write it, and it will be incomprehensible to users. That’s Legal’s job: to write documents for judges and other lawyers to read.

I’d argue that companies should think of their privacy policy as not a legal document but as a product feature, and let product managers (or whoever is responsible for feature ideas) write them. The audience then would be the user and the wording would more likely be understandable. Most companies’ product teams are better equipped to articulate the benefits and trade-offs to end users.

The problem is when product managers use language that is understandable to most people but leaves a lot of loopholes and results in lawsuits.

Writing legal documents is a lot like writing code— you are trying to leave no room for ambiguity (or bugs), need to cover all the edge cases, and the code is inevitably at least as complex as the domain in which it operates.

Depends on your legal system. It doesn't have to be letter of the law, which is how the US operates, leading to abominations of phrasing like "damages including but not limited to foo, bar, baz" etc. In other jurisdictions, spirit of the law is good enough, so you can just write "damages" and something like a reasonable person test is applied.

Example: In the US, rent agreements can be dense, 30 page affairs and still be legally binding. In Europe or Australia, 5 pages or less usually suffices, and longer documents may simply be ruled unreasonable.

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