How Short Is Too Short? Implications of Length and Framing on the Effectiveness of Privacy Notices

Privacy policies are often too long and difficult to understand, and are therefore ignored by users. Shorter privacy notices with clearer wording may increase users’ privacy awareness, particularly for emerging mobile and wearable devices with small screens. In this paper, we examine the potential of (1) shortening privacy notices, by removing privacy practices that a large majority of users are already aware of, and (2) highlighting the implications of described privacy practices with positive or negative framing. We conducted three online user studies focused on privacy notice design for fitness wearables. Our results indicate that short-form privacy notices can inform users about privacy practices. However, we found no effect from including positive or negative framing in our notices. Finally, we found that removing expected privacy practices from notices sometimes led to less awareness of those practices, without improving awareness of the practices that remained in the shorter notices. Given that shorter notices are typically expected to be more effective, we find the lack of increased awareness of the practices remaining in the notice surprising. Our results suggest that the length of an effective privacy notice may be bounded. We provide an analysis of factors influencing our participants’ awareness of privacy practices and discuss the implications of our findings on the design of privacy notices.