Evaluating the Readability of Privacy Policies in Mobile Environments

Abstract

Recent work has suggested that the current “breed” of privacy policy represents a significant challenge in terms of comprehension to the average Internet-user. Due to display limitations, it is easy to represent the conjecture that this comprehension level should drop when these policies are moved into a mobile environment. This paper explores the question of how much does comprehension decrease when privacy policies are viewed on mobile versus desktop environments and does this decrease make them useless in their current format? It reports on a formal subject-based experiment, which seeks to evaluate how readable are privacy policy statements found on the Internet but presented in mobile environments. This experiment uses fifty participants and privacy policies collected from ten of the most popular web sites on the Internet. It evaluates, using a Cloze test, the subject’s ability to comprehend the content of these privacy policies.