A client sent me their revised privacy policy last week and asked if I would look at the language. Eleven pages. Forty-two uses of the word partners. One long sentence about sharing information with third parties for purposes including but not limited to. When I got to the end I could not have told you a single concrete thing that company does with anybody's data.
It was written by lawyers to be accurate and unreadable. It succeeded at both.
Here's the part that gets lost. People already assume they are being tracked. California's privacy law took effect in January. Apple spent June telling developers they will soon have to ask before following users across apps. The rules are arriving regardless. What has not arrived is one major consumer brand willing to say the plain thing in plain words.
Privacy is not a compliance problem to be survived. It is the largest piece of unclaimed positioning territory in consumer marketing.
I keep thinking about Alien. The crew of the Nostromo spend the film assuming they work for a company that wants them home alive. Then Ripley pulls up Special Order 937 and finds the directive she was never meant to read: the specimen is the priority, the crew is expendable. The horror is not the creature. The horror is that the terms were written into the ship they lived inside and nobody handed them a copy. Every privacy policy I have read this year is Special Order 937 with better typography.
The opportunity is obvious and almost nobody is taking it. Three moves, none of them expensive. One, write the policy in the voice of the brand instead of the voice of counsel, and put the three sentences that matter at the top. Two, collect less, because deletion is a feature you can put on a homepage. Three, make the promise falsifiable.
DuckDuckGo built a real business on one checkable sentence. Patagonia earned its credibility by publishing numbers that cost it money. I've watched this from inside brand strategy rooms, and the reason nobody claims this territory is never strategy. It is that someone in growth has a dashboard that would get smaller.
Every privacy policy I have read this year is Special Order 937 with better typography.
Barnaby has a chip in his shoulder, a feeder that logs his weight, and a camera pointed at the litter box, and he has consented to none of it. Truffles avoids all three, which probably makes her the more sophisticated consumer. The rest of us are somewhere in the middle: aware, mildly annoyed, and waiting for one brand to tell us something we can actually check.