Many people accept privacy policies without reading them, study reveals

87% of people accept privacy policies without reading them, with TikTok, Whatsapp privacy policies being among hardest to understand, according to a survey conducted by Addictivetips.com.

Addictivetips.com has surveyed 2,105 individuals to investigate how effective privacy policies are based on how much we understand and how clear companies make them. Top social media platforms’ privacy policies were analysed to uncover how readable they really are. Survey findings reveal that:

• TikTok’s privacy policy requires a reading age of 17+ - despite having a sign-up age of 13 years old;
• On average, social media privacy policies take over 47 minutes to read fully;
• TikTok, WhatsApp, and Linkedin privacy policies are amongst the longest;
• API (62%), cookies (57%) and third-party data (53%) top the list of privacy policy jargon people don’t understand.

When asked why they don’t read policies, users named reasons such as:

• 89% of participants said they are too long;
• 83% said they’d consent whether they read it or not;
• 74% felt they wouldn’t be able to grasp what they were reading.

Scandals surrounding GDPR and the introduction of the Data Protection Act in 2018 were not enough to help some people gain a better understanding of the term as Addictivetips.com found that 41% of people are still unsure what it means despite it being mentioned in 87% of policies.