When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Heres how it works.
It’s happened countless times.
If you are guilty of never reading these important documents, you are certainly not alone.
The top 20 websites in every country were retrieved from SimilarWeb and the countries were chosen by NordVPN’s survey of countries in which citizens care about digital privacy.
But how long would it take users if they were to actually read privacy policies?
Well, a lot of time.
Let’s dig intoNordVPN’s findings as we explore what should be done to make these policies more accessible.
The top 20 websites in every country were retrieved from SimilarWeb and the countries were chosen by NordVPN’s survey of countries in which citizens care about digital privacy.
The experts counted the number of words in the privacy policies, while evaluating their readability levels.
“That would take around a workweek (5 days) every month,” he said.
“A minimum-wage worker in the US would earn around $338.14 during that time.”
US policies are certainly awfully long to read, but they aren’t actually the longest.
This accolade goes to Germany, boasting an average 10,485 words and about 44 minutes reading time.
That’s quite an achievement considering that the global average is around 6,460 words and 27.14 minutes.
Other countries with the longest policies also include the UK, Italy, Poland, and France.
X (formerly known as Twitter) is much shorter, counting a total of 4,175 words .
However, the latter received the same “fairly difficult” score on the FRES and Coleman-Liau readability tests.
Length is just one factor determining the accessibility of a privacy policy.
“A clear privacy policy helps to build trust between businesses and their customers,” Warmenhoven told me.
The latter is probably even more concerning considering there are many children also using the platform.
“There are a number of ways that can help users to get acquainted with privacy policies easier.
As a rule of thumb, he said you should avoid those websites lacking a privacy policy.
We test and review VPN services in the context of legal recreational uses.
We do not support or condone the illegal or malicious use of VPN services.
Consuming pirated content that is paid-for is neither endorsed nor approved by Future Publishing.
