The "Privacy Policy" Policy

Privacy policies: most apps and websites have them, buried away somewhere. These legal documents explain how the company collects, uses, and shares your personal data. But let's be honest, few of us actually read these things, right? And that passive acceptance says a lot about our complicated relationship with online privacy.

In the Season 5 premiere of IRL, host Manoush Zomorodi speaks with Charlie Warzel, writer-at-large with the New York Times, about our complicated relationship with data and privacy — and the role privacy policies play in keeping things, well, confusing. You'll also hear from Parker and Lila, two young girls who realize how gaming and personal data intersect. Rowenna Fielding, a data protection expert, walks us through the most efficient ways to understand a privacy policy. Professor Lorrie Cranor explains how these policies have warped our understanding of consent. And privacy lawyer Jenny Afia explains why "privacy" is a base element of being human.

IRL is an original podcast from Firefox. For more on the series go to irlpodcast.org.

Charlie Warzel is an Opinion writer at large for the New York Times. You can get more insights from him about privacy online when you sign up for the Times’ Privacy Project Newsletter.

If you’d like to learn more about privacy policies and their impact on our youth, check out Jenny Afia’s article on tech’s exploitative relationship with our children.

This IRL podcast episode referenced several privacy policies, and we encourage you to read them. To start, here’s Firefox’s privacy policy. You’ll see that Firefox’s business model is not dependent on packaging your personal info. And, we hope you’ll find that our policy is easy-to-read, fully transparent, and specific.

The other privacy policies referenced in this episode include:

Google’s privacy policies Uber’s privacy policy Microsoft’s privacy policy Twitter’s privacy policy Facebook’s privacy policy