After reading an article about online privacy policies and their general incomprehensibility to
the average consumer (Fanguy, Kleen, Soule, 2004),
we thought it might be interesting to run some readability
analyses on some online privacy policies.
The first is a well-known social networking site's privacy policy.
Below is a summary of the readability results for the entire text of the privacy policy excluding contact information:
And below is the Fry readability graph for every 500-word sample from the beginning to the end.
The text averages out to a reading level of about 13th grade (college freshman) with the most difficult
passages falling into the 19th grade (see paragraph below).
This is an interesting finding as it is well-noted that the average adult in the U.S. reads at about an
8th grade level
(DuBay, 2006).
More in line with the methods of Fanguy, Kleen, and Soule,
we also performed a Cloze Test
on a 127 word sample of the policy which we had not read
by removing every 5th word(the average and median
of the Gunning fog, Flesch-Kincaid, SMOG, Coleman-Liau, and Automated readability indices
were 19th grade).
The authors of this site scored 48% which falls short of the common standard of 60%
in order to be considered easy reading for a target audience.
We may interpret this result to mean that assuming we are among the target audience of this
statement, that this particular passage is not easy reading for us.