Hacker News Reader

Comment by thecleaner | Hacker News Reader

Oh my god thank you so much for doing this !

I think its better (for me as a user) if you don't boil things down to a score as different people expect different things when talking privacy. It would help if you could simply highlight the potential problematic clauses in different privacy statements along with some reason why it might be problematic.

View on HN

I don't agree. I just looked in my password manager, and I have roughly ~220 accounts across the web. If I want to go through that list and see which website rank well and which rank poorly, and I want to do that in under two hours, that gives about 30 seconds per service.

In other words, giving a single score plus a two-sentence highlight is probably about the right amount of information.

Or make the rank adjustable to some personal criteria that matches different privacy expectations.

This would also be helpful in determining how to weight (or not) user feedback in the training portion. I just tried it out (the 10 questions) and there were at least a few I thought, "huh, I know some others would disagree with me on this" because I value X and they value Y more.

Having scores that weight X more than Y would give me more accurate scores, while seemingly also giving other people more accurate scores at the same time.

How about a compromise - not a score for each policy but for "each" individual, or tranche of similarly concerned individuals. I go through a list of privacy options (maybe just once) and the point at which my "okay" becomes "not okay" determines my score. Then each policy simply passes or fails based on my score. And if you want more detail, the list of failure items for a given policy can be bulleted.

A good compromise would be a chrome extension that shows a 1-10 score. You click the extension to see clauses

Not for everyone, as thecleaner pointed out. You are assuming your requirements are universal among other users. Also, you are assuming the policies can be simplified to a weighted average of their parts, which is not necessarily the case.

well, just checked and i already see the majority of the web gathering around "C". so really, we can argue both ways about this score thing...

The scoring definitely needs some work – I think some factors should have more weight. Also services' data vary a lot so it's difficult to come up with a good measure for everyone. Ex: I try to take into account whether the service has had any recent data breach, so it penalizes a lot if it has but also scores rather low if it hasn't; privacy policies' length vary wildly and I think that also plays a large role... It needs some tweaking but I think with some improvements I'll reach a more accurate scoring

Reply on news.ycombinator.com