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4 ISJLP 543 (2008-2009)
The Cost of Reading Privacy Policies

handle is hein.journals/isjlpsoc4 and id is 563 raw text is: The Cost of Reading Privacy Policies ALEECIA M. MCDONALD & LORRIE FAITH CRANOR* Abstract: Companies collect personally identifiable information that website visitors are not always comfortable sharing. One proposed remedy is to use economics rather than legislation to address privacy risks by creating a marketplace for privacy where website visitors would choose to accept or reject offers for small payments in exchange for loss of privacy. The notion of micropayments for privacy has not been realized in practice, perhaps because advertisers might be willing to pay a penny per name and IP address, yet few people would sell their contact information for only a penny.1 In this paper we contend that the time to read privacy policies is, in and of itself, a form of payment. Instead of receiving payments to reveal information, website visitors must pay with their time to research policies in order to retain their privacy. We pose the question: if website users were to read the privacy policy for each site they visit just once a year, what would their time be worth? Aleecia M. McDonald is a Ph.D. candidate in Engineering and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University. Lorrie Faith Cranor is an Associate Professor of Computer Science and of Engineering and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University where she is director of the CyLab Usable Privacy and Security Laboratory (CUPS). We gratefully acknowledge Janice Tsai, Ponnurangam Kumaraguru, and Pitikorn Tengtakul for support, feedback, and helpful comments on preliminary drafts of this work. This paper benefited from insightful conversations with H. Scott Matthews, Jon M. Peha, Alessandro Acquisti, and Chriss Swaney. The authors thank Robert McGuire for his assistance with analysis. Many thanks to Michelle McGiboney and Suzy Bausch of The Nielsen Company. This research was funded in part by U.S. Army Research Office contract no. DAAD19-o2-1-0389 (Perpetually Available and Secure Information Systems) to Carnegie Mellon University's CyLab. 'Simson Garfinkel, Database Nation: The Death of Privacy in the 21st Century (Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly & Associates, 2001), 183.

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