In Defense of the Long Privacy Statement

Mike Hintze

This Essay discusses the multiple purposes of privacy statements, including the legal obligations they are designed to fulfill. It recognizes that there are many audiences for privacy statements, including consumers, regulators, policymakers, academics, researchers, investors, advocates, and journalists. Further, this Essay argues that efforts to make privacy statements significantly shorter and simpler only optimize these statements for the one audience least likely to read them—consumers—rather than the audiences in the best position to police privacy statements and the practices they describe.