Study claims family privacy terms exceed Shakespeare’s complete works

A Web3 Foundation study claims the privacy policies and terms attached to a family’s routine digital activity can exceed the length of Shakespeare’s complete works, highlighting the scale of consent material facing consumers.

In a PRNewswire release, the organisation said a modelled British family scenario involved 257 consumer privacy and terms documents containing 1,184,835 words. It said that would take about 83 hours to read, equivalent to 10.4 eight-hour working days. The release compared the total with 884,647 words for the complete works of William Shakespeare, saying the family’s digital paperwork was 34 per cent longer.

The findings come from a white paper titled Everyday Surveillance: What One Ordinary Day May Reveal About You. According to the release, researchers modelled six typical households in the United Kingdom and United States, and identified 1,195 relevant privacy and terms documents with more than 5.38 million words in total.

The release said 143 companies and institutions were examined. Of those, 83 per cent referred to the possible use of personal data for marketing or advertising, 80 per cent referred to combining it with other information, and 71 per cent referred to sharing it with business partners. At least 24 per cent had documents indicating user data could be used to train or improve artificial intelligence systems, according to the release.

The source material does not include the full methodology, the names of the organisations assessed, or details of any independent peer review. It is also unclear from the release how reading speed was calculated, how services were selected for each household, or whether regional differences in privacy law were analysed.

Even so, the figures point to a continuing concern for digital services: consumers are expected to agree to large volumes of legal material while using everyday connected products and platforms.