Lawyers come off badly in Wendy M. Grossman's look at that website essential, the Privacy Policy, in Technology Guardian. She has a point, but, it's often down to a client's thought processes as much as any failing on the part of lawyers.
If you think too much about privacy - as any business dealing with personal data should - it's almost inevitable that you will you create an extensive policy that few will read, and fewer will understand. Wendy Grossman's points to Amazon.com's privacy policy as an example of how not to do it. Amazon's policy is so long, it has its own table of contents.
Whilst the article is a little too US-centric for those interested in privacy in the UK, her suggestion that the ideal privacy policy should be " a model of brevity, clarity and restraint" is absolutely right. Some may see privacy policies as boring - and as someone who reads them, they often are - but it's important that they are neither "a legalese statement of what the company thinks it can get away with" or an "afterthought".
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