It is well-known that people rarely read privacy policies. Privacy and Data Policies in Print is a set of booklets that present verbatim the privacy and data policies for some of the most popular digital services, products, and platforms. The design includes 4 primary components: (1) covers, (2) pull quotes, (3) comment cards, and (4) slip covers. This format was devised to solicit responses from people concerning the content and function of these curious interfaces.

The title , covers, and pull quotes represent the only layers of textual commentary, which were deliberately kept minimal. While the Privacy and Data Policies in Print booklets can be read as a critical commentary, viewed as a proposed solution, or used as tools for qualitative data collection, they are best grasped as a combination of these uses.

Rather than constrain the Privacy and Data Policies in Print packets to specific roles or uses—such as prototypes to evaluate or cultural probe packages for eliciting creative responses—these packets have been designed for a multiplicity of conventional and experimental functions. As alternatives to methodological or formal tropes such as “prototype deployment” or “conceptual design”, this project experiments with roadmapping many different possibilities for the packets to function as prototypes, products, research instruments, conceptual gestures and commentaries, and other less easily classified things.

Related Publications

James Pierce, Sarah Fox, Nick Merrill, Richmond Wong, and Carl DiSalvo. 2018. An Interface without A User: An Exploratory Design Study of Online Privacy Policies and Digital Legalese. In Proceedings of the 2018 Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS '18). ACM Press.
[ACM Open Access]