A study conducted by Pew in 2019 showed that Only 9% of Americans always read the privacy policies on websites and apps.This raises an important question: to what extent are users actually consenting to the collection of their data?

The famous newspaper The Washington Post He initiated the important debate regarding this issue by publishing an article yesterday that questions... Excessive use of text in privacy policiesThis makes it difficult for customers to be fully aware of what they are consenting to, causing them to accept these policies without having actually read them.

Geoffrey A. Fowler, the author of the article, conducted an experiment on this and calculated all the privacy policies of the apps on his smartphone, and discovered that these policies totaled... Almost 1 million words.

Carnegie Mellon University engineering and public policy professor Lorrie Cranor and her colleague estimated that To read and agree to all the privacy policies on websites that Americans commonly visit would require 244 hours a year. That was in 2008.

For users, the issue of consent is considered a lost cause.

It turns out that, on every website you visit, there's a banner about... privacy which almost no one actually reads. No one has time to stop at every website and app and read the entire lengthy privacy policy of each one.

This creates a consent action that happens automatically, since people usually just click "I agree".

Imagine a scenario where a person has two children, each with their own cell phone or tablet. Even if that person dedicated their life to raising these children, they wouldn't be able to read every single policy on every website their children browse.

This creates an extremely heavy burden for the user, who constantly has to hear that they have a choice about their personal data, whereas, The entire system is designed so that he has no option but to accept it.

This consent without it having actually been given, This ultimately leaves the user vulnerable to potentially malicious actions and then blamed for it.since supposedly there was another choice.

Twitter is trying to differentiate itself by turning its privacy policy into a game.

Recently, Twitter innovated by creating a kind of game, the Twitter Data Dash, to insert the user into your privacy policyHowever, even so, this was not the best solution.

Twitter's privacy policy, with its 4.500 words, would still require something users don't have to spare: time.

Obviously, when compared to Facebook's privacy policy, with its 12.000 words, Twitter's attempt could be considered very valid.

The point is, We shouldn't be wasting time from our already busy day reading every privacy policy that comes along.Instead, companies would have to collect the minimum amount possible, so that this consent may be requested in specific situations. Like Twitter, which requires users to enable location services so that location tagging can be done in posts.

The burden of responsibility for consent has been placed on the user's shoulders, who, in addition to being unfamiliar with the language used in these policies, also has to stop every time they need to navigate between websites or download applications.

"Maybe you don't do things that need a million words of explanation? Do it differently." "You can't abuse, misuse, or leverage data that you didn't collect in the first place.""said Rebecca Kelly Slaughter, commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission."

The fact is, technology can help us make choices, instead of just being used to invade our privacy.

But for this to be possible, we cannot expect companies to act out of goodwill on the issue.

Laws exist for this reason. And it's high time they were designed to protect the user, instead of contributing to making them legally vulnerable.