#The Atlantic Best of The Atlantic publisher The Atlantic * Subscribe * Search * Menu How to Make Privacy Policies Better, in Two Easy Steps * * * ____________________ (BUTTON) Close * Home * Latest * Most Popular * Magazine * Video * Photo * Writers * News * Politics * Business * Culture * Science * Technology * Health * Sexes * U.S. * Education * Global * Notes * Projects * Events * Books * Shop * Your AccountSign Out * Sign InSign Up [javascript] 2 Free Issues Try two trial issues of The Atlantic with our compliments. Claim now Follow * Facebook * Twitter * LinkedIn * Tumblr * Pinterest * RSS * App Store See our Newsletters > previousNew Orleans Is Still Not Prepared for the Next Storm What Do Americans Really Think About Education Policy?next story How to Make Privacy Policies Better, in Two Easy Steps Okay, they’re not so easy. But they would save us from the eternal amend-then-freak-out cycle. [lead_960.jpg?1440513320] Daniel Ek, Spotify's CEO, speaks during a May press event in New York. Shannon Stapleton / Reuters We noticed that you have an AD BLOCKER ENABLED Please consider disabling it for our site, or supporting our work in one of these ways [large.jpg?1450107429] [large.jpg?1446761730] Subscribe Now > __________________________________________________________________ Sign up for The Atlantic Daily newsletter ____________________ [X] I want to receive updates from partners and sponsors. Sign up * * * * * * * * * Robinson Meyer * Aug 25, 2015 * Technology The end of last week saw one of those tech stories that runs the cycle—from Twitter outrage to corporate chagrin—in less than 48 hours. Here’s what happened: On Thursday, a major tech company (in this case, Spotify) debuted a new privacy policy. The policy permitted the software to access more information than seemed reasonable (in this case, a user’s photos, contacts, and GPS location), and people were upset. They had no easy way to opt out of the new contract: They either had to agree to it or leave the service. Late that night, a nerd hero (in this case, Markus Persson, the developer of Minecraft) told the service on Twitter that he had cancelled his subscription and that the company should be ashamed of itself. (His words: “Please consider not being evil.”) More corporate shaming from less high-profile nerds ensued Friday morning, as pundits more sympathetic to the needs of venture capital in turn condescended users. By noon in California, it was all over: The company had clarified its policy and apologized for not communicating better. Fin. Another privacy-policy scandal managed, another variant on corporate Big Brother avoided. (Though a Spotify-driven surveillance regime would look less like 1984’s Oceania and more like The Apple’s disco-dystopian West Berlin.) So privacy policies could nicely disappear from the tech news slate—at least, until the next scandal. And there will be a next scandal. The agita over Spotify’s privacy policy resembled disputes just this year over other companies’s privacy policies—like Samsung’s and Uber’s—as well as the the cyclical fretting over Facebook’s reach. These scandals have attained a degree of predictability: They are almost as formulaic as the legalese of the policies themselves. But beyond the cycle of discovery, outrage, and apologetic adjustment, there are deeper problems. The way lawyers, executives, and developers address user privacy just doesn’t work that well. Neither consumers nor corporations benefit from our current amend-then-freak-out regime. That’s partly because, if we’re being honest, privacy policies are kinda boring. They’re how new and shiny consumer software gets scaffolded in mundanity. Just like how, when your new Cuisinart or Frigidaire arrives, no one looks at the manual that comes with it. The sum is that no one wants to think about privacy policies except during a crisis—and corporations want to avoid a crisis. So when they do have to amend their policies, companies are reluctant to provide too much information lest they initiate a negative PR cycle. But that reluctance leads them to state their privacy policy expansively or in forbidding legalese—and then they invite that same crisis, as users interpret the policy in the worst way. This traps both consumers and companies in a cycle of bad faith. As the privacy consultant Jonathan Salem Baskin put it: The fait accompli behind privacy practices is that businesses have the right to intrude massively into customer’s lives and, since the policies are legal agreements (often executed by nothing more than their tolerance), people have made consciously willing trades: their privacy for better playlists, or shoe ads. This just isn’t true, since few people understand those transactions. It also violates every conceivable psychological or sociological model of how humans define and manage their privacy, which depend on two parties learning to trust and reveal information to one another over time. “It doesn’t have to be like this,” Baskin wrote. “There’s nothing inherently wrong with customers sharing their personal information or behavior, nor with companies using it to improve their operations and, gasp, profiting from it.” The situation could also be improved with two different specific adjustments, one legal and one technical. Legally, the tech-policy writer Logan Koepke (who, full disclosure, is a friend of mine) advocates that companies should announce a new privacy policy whenever they change. Right now, most consumer-tech companies only announce changes whenever they make “material” changes to their policy. (The last time the Federal Trade Commission issued guidance on privacy policies, in 2009, it recommended that process.) But that means that it’s up to tech companies to decide which changes are material and which are not—which sets up a potentially adversarial relationship between company and consumer. If companies instead notified users of every change to their privacy policy, they will be more skittish about making any change, Koepke believes, and more likely to frame the changes they do make in more public-facing language. The benefits of this would then accumulate over time: Once a more user-respecting privacy regime is mandatory, companies will compete on privacy. Medium has since changed its privacy policy accordingly, and it now notifies users whenever it makes a change to its policies. The FTC should encourage similar companies to do the same. * * * If a regulatory change looks unlikely, though, there is a technical intervention that Apple and Google could make. To explain how, it’s worth getting into the nitty-gritty of the Spotify flap. One of the clauses that most worried users was the following: Depending on the type of device that you use to interact with the Service and your settings, we may also collect information about your location based on, for example, your phone’s GPS location or other forms of locating mobile devices (e.g., Bluetooth). The company says this access was needed for its new Running feature, announced in July, that monitored someone’s jogging pace and served them tunes appropriately. And when the company’s CEO, Daniel Ek, explained the new policy on Friday, he said that that type of data collection would always require a user’s permission: We will never gather or use the location of your mobile device without your explicit permission. We would use it to help personalize recommendations or to keep you up to date about music trending in your area. (Wired’s coverage, by the way, is revealing about how dissonant the tech industry’s thinking about privacy is right now: A feature described innocuously in Spotify’s “lovely” and “powerful” “hunt for the perfect playlist” on July 20 becomes, exactly a month later, something “eerie” that the user “can’t do squat about.”) On Twitter, Nick Seaver, an incoming anthropology professor at Tufts University, pointed that the social costs of Spotify’s privacy policy emerged from social and technical limitations. “The creepiness isn’t in using GPS for the running feature or whatever, it’s in asking for GPS access independent of a specific use,” he wrote. “In normal social interaction, you can tell someone where you are for a while without giving them ‘forever access’ to your location.” To Seaver, this makes the case for “seamfulness” in design: Software should be asking for permission to use personal data more, not less. Currently, many designers aim for a “seamless” experience and take a set-it-and-forget-it approach to app privacy. The Facebook app on the iPhone, for instance, has to ask for permission the first time it tries to access the phone’s photos, camera, or GPS location—but once a user has given access, it never has to ask again. (“Seamlessness” as a goal resembles Facebook’s infamous “frictionless sharing.”) This seamlessness is a software problem. On iOS, users can be specific about what kind of data an app can access: It can see their photos, for instance, but not their location. But once they’ve given it that access the first time, the app never asks again. A user has to go manually turn off permissions in the phone’s settings to restrict access. Android users, meanwhile, can’t even give apps permission with that level of granularity yet. It will be a feature in the next major update. Imagine if, right before a run, Spotify asked for 60 minutes of access to your GPS location. If you still seemed on the move 55 minutes later, it would ask for another hour of access. That seems to me like a better trade: Not all the access, all the time, wherever; but access right now, for a little while, here. Apple or Google could encourage this practice simply by making that feature possible at the operating-system level. It would be more seamful, and it would be more trustworthy. Such a technical advance would still require companies to communicate their privacy policies better to users—would require them to turn privacy policies from standalone, hedging, anxious land grabs into “living, breathing documents that represent a company’s culture,” as Koepke put it. But doing so would save both companies and users significant distress, taking us out of the cycle of wonder and shock. * Continue Reading * Jump to Comments * About the Author * * * * * * * * Latest Video [thumb_wide_300.jpg?1453474769] How America Trains Its Officers to Respond to School Shootings Inside the program that's preparing law enforcement for the rise in active shooting incidents * The Editors * 10:56 AM ET * Latest Slideshow [thumb_wide_300.jpg?1447874076] Peter Garritano In Photos: Inside the Internet Photographs of what “the cloud” actually looks like * Emily Anne Epstein * Jan 5, 2016 * About the Author * [headshot.jpg] Robinson Meyer is an associate editor at The Atlantic, where he covers technology. + Twitter + Email Most Popular Presented by * [javascript] Reuters Standing Athwart History Yelling, 'Stop Donald Trump!' + Conor Friedersdorf The National Review publishes the movement-conservative case against the Republican frontrunner. Last summer, George F. 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Bernstein / Reuters Why Precisely Is Bernie Sanders Against Reparations? + Ta-Nehisi Coates The Vermont senator’s political imagination is active against plutocracy, but why is it so limited against white supremacy? Last week Bernie Sanders was asked whether he was in favor of “reparations for slavery.” It is worth considering Sanders’s response in full: No, I don’t think so. First of all, its likelihood of getting through Congress is nil. Second of all, I think it would be very divisive. The real issue is when we look at the poverty rate among the African American community, when we look at the high unemployment rate within the African American community, we have a lot of work to do. 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How to cook collards: https://t.co/2lk2bMnKdS #HealthYeah pic.twitter.com/YqBPXg3uus — Whole Foods Market (@WholeFoods) January 14, 2016 One imagines a marketing staffer drafting the Tweet without apprehension or anxiety. Obesity is epidemic. Americans suffer from their unhealthy diets in myriad ways. Who could object to a supermarket cheerily touting a leafy green vegetable? Alerted to the Tweet by a foodie who asked me to explain why it was controversial, I looked at it, vaguely recalled that Michelle Obama had included a collard-greens recipe in her cookbook, American Grown, and asked if maybe the Red Tribe was giving the Blue Tribe a bit of ribbing about its affinity for plant-based diets? Continue Reading * [javascript] Stefano Rellandini / Reuters Sympathy for the Macklemore + Spencer Kornhaber “White Privilege II” bravely tackles difficult truths about race, but that doesn’t make it a good song. 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His wife worked for a big Wall Street bank, right?” Continue Reading * [javascript] Carlos Javier Ortiz The Case for Reparations + Ta-Nehisi Coates Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole. And if thy brother, a Hebrew man, or a Hebrew woman, be sold unto thee, and serve thee six years; then in the seventh year thou shalt let him go free from thee. And when thou sendest him out free from thee, thou shalt not let him go away empty: thou shalt furnish him liberally out of thy flock, and out of thy floor, and out of thy winepress: of that wherewith the LORD thy God hath blessed thee thou shalt give unto him. And thou shalt remember that thou wast a bondman in the land of Egypt, and the LORD thy God redeemed thee: therefore I command thee this thing today. — Deuteronomy 15: 12–15 Besides the crime which consists in violating the law, and varying from the right rule of reason, whereby a man so far becomes degenerate, and declares himself to quit the principles of human nature, and to be a noxious creature, there is commonly injury done to some person or other, and some other man receives damage by his transgression: in which case he who hath received any damage, has, besides the right of punishment common to him with other men, a particular right to seek reparation. Continue Reading * [javascript] Toby Talbot / AP The Decline of the Driver's License + Julie Beck Fewer people of all ages are getting them, and it’s not quite clear why. Remember how, in Clueless, Alicia Silverstone’s character Cher fails her driver’s test after nearly killing a biker and scraping her car alongside several parked cars? And then how she asks, “Do you think I should write them a note?” as she drives away? And then how, at the climax of the movie, her friend Tai (Brittany Murphy) calls her “a virgin who can’t drive” and it is just the harshest burn? Well, that was a fictionalized version of the ‘90s, and this is now. Things are different. Young people are not getting driver’s licenses so much anymore. In fact, no one is. According to a new study by Michael Sivak and Brandon Schoettle at the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute, the percentage of people with a driver’s license decreased between 2011 and 2014, across all age groups. For people aged 16 to 44, that percentage has been decreasing steadily since 1983. 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Local, state, and federal officials have been scrambling to organize their responses to the blizzard as residents swarm grocery stores to stock up on food and water. As of Friday afternoon, there were already five storm-related deaths reported. Continue Reading * [javascript] The Most Powerful Images of 2015 + Greyson Korhonen and Alan Taylor A selection of the year's best photos Watch Video * [javascript] A Photojournalist Walks Away From His Profession + Nadine Ajaka How do you decide when you've seen enough of war? Watch Video * [javascript] Dennis Hlynsky / The Atlantic / Pearson Scott Foreman / Wikimedia Commons Revealing the Hidden Patterns of Birds and Insects in Motion + Sam Price-Waldman A video shows the dreamlike voyages of starlings, water striders, and more. Watch Video More Popular Stories Show Comments Subscribe Get 10 issues a year and save 65% off the cover price. 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