Bah Another New and Useless Privacy Policy to Protect Us from Ourselves

Thursday, February 04 2010 -

Why is it that every few years some company decides that the internet is “too complicated” for most people so let’s dumb it down to a simple set of icons. We tried this before with P3P and that worked so well. I clearly remember the scramble at Staples.com to implement P3P and the long discussions that were had. As I recall Tom Frost actually had the unenviable task of finishing the implementation and where did that get us?

You can make as many “informative” icons as you want, it isn’t going to make people behave any smarter. Look at browsers and SSL certificates. We now have various icons for those, from the ubiquitous lock, to the colored address bar, to annoying pop-ups that warn you a site isn’t safe and they are all ignored. Why is another silly icon going to change that?