Grading Privacy Policies

Now ask students if they know what an app’s privacy policy is, and what it does.

Explain that it is not true, as many people think, that if an app has a privacy policy it will not collect any information about you. What a privacy policy does is tell you:

• What information they collect;
• What they are allowed to do with it;
• Who they can share it with; and
• How long they can keep it, among other things.

Now have students navigate to the student chapter Privacy Policies. Have them use the interactive activity to guess how long it would take to read the Terms of Service and Privacy Policy for:

• Instagram? (Approximately nine and a half hours.)
• YouTube? (Thirteen and three-quarters hours.)
• Amazon? (Fourteen hours.)
• TikTok? (Thirty-one and a half hours.)

(Estimates from SocialMediaToday.)