How often do you read the terms and conditions, EULAs and privacy policies? While we know we should read the fine print, it's something few of us bother to do, and certainly not at all.
The nonprofit organization Tax Policy Associates wanted to demonstrate how useless these documents are, so in February 2024 it added a line to its privacy policy, offering a “bottle of good wine” to the first person who saw the offer. and get in touch.
After three months without anyone noticing the addition, the bounty was finally found by someone who stumbled upon it after looking at various online privacy policy examples to get an idea of how to create their own.
It's not the first time
The organization's director, Dan Neidle, shared the story on X and told the bbc was “my childish rant that every company has to have a privacy policy and no one reads it. Every little coffee shop has to have a privacy policy on their website, it's crazy. It's money being wasted.”
In his coverage, which was the most read news on the site, the bbc It noted that any company that holds personal data, “including small businesses and charities”, must have a privacy policy under the UK's General Data Protection Regulation 2018 (GDPR).
This is actually the second time Tax Policy Associates has made a sneaky addition to its privacy policy. The first time it took four months to find it. “We did it again to see if people were paying more attention and they're not,” Neidle told the BBC.
The wording of the company's privacy policy has since been changed following the discovery and now reads: “We know no one reads this, because we added in February that we would send a bottle of fine wine to the first person who contacted us, and Only in May did we get a response.”
If you're wondering what counts as a “good” bottle of wine in this case, the answer, according to the BBC, is a Château de Sales 2013/14, Pomerol.
Our ongoing experiment on whether anyone reads website terms and conditions continues. We put this into our terms in February. They just claimed it. pic.twitter.com/N7k3weTuA9May 9, 2024
More from TechRadar Pro
