The TL;DR Charter: Speculatively Demystifying Privacy Policy Documents and Terms Agreements

Privacy policy and term agreement documents are considered the gateway for software adoption and use. The documents provide a means for the provider to outline expectations of the software use, and also provide an often-separate document outlining how user data is collected, stored, and used--including if it is shared with other parties. A user agreeing with the terms, assumes that they have a full understanding the terms of the agreement and have provided consent. Often however, users do not read the documents because they are long and full of legalistic and inconsistent language, are regularly amended, and may not disclose all the details on what is done to the user data. Enforcing compliance and ensuring user consent have been persistent challenges to policy makers and privacy researchers. This design fiction puts forward an alternate reality and presents a policy-based approach to fording the consent gap with the TL;DR Charter: an agreement governing the parties involved by harnessing the power of formal governments, industry, and other stakeholders, and taking users expectation of privacy into account. The Charter allows us as researchers to examine the implications on trust, decision-making, consent, accountability and the impact of future technologies.