One family faced 1.19 million words of digital fine print

A Swiss study suggests that reviewing the terms and privacy notices attached to one ordinary day of digital life could take an Icelandic family about a week and a half. The findings were reported by mbl.is in an article by Andrés Magnússon.

Researchers at the Swiss organisation Web3 modelled six typical households in Britain and the United States, following each through a day and then reading the accompanying small print. For a couple in Leeds with two primary-school-aged children, the documents totalled 257 and contained 1.19 million words. Reading them would take 83 hours, or 10.4 eight-hour workdays.

The family’s devices and services were connected to 88 companies and organisations, 25 of which could collect information about the children. The parents’ smartwatches recorded their movements and every 50th heartbeat. School monitoring systems captured the children about 100 times a day and logged 11,400 keystrokes a week, including text they had not sent. At home, a smart television could take tens of thousands of screenshots, analyse them and provide information its manufacturer could monetise.

Among 143 service providers examined, 83 per cent reserved the right to use data for marketing, 71 per cent to share it with “partners”, 66 per cent set no time limit for storage and 24 per cent to use it to train artificial intelligence. Users had accepted the terms with a click.

Iceland’s national ID can link data

Iceland is covered by the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation through the European Economic Area. The article says the rules are at least as strict as British law and considerably stricter than those in the United States. It also argues that Icelandic officials sometimes implement European rules more strictly than necessary, increasing bureaucracy without necessarily improving public protection.

Iceland’s smaller population means there are fewer domestic services collecting information, the article says. But international platforms including Google, Meta, Apple, Samsung, Netflix and TikTok apply the same terms in Iceland as elsewhere. The legal language can be difficult for English speakers and even harder for Icelanders, it says.

The article also warns that Iceland’s national identification number makes it easier to link information from different sources. Public bodies, both national and municipal, have requested the number without a specific need, according to the article; the Data Protection Authority has objected to such practices and sometimes issued fines.

Plans to connect confidential information held by unrelated public authorities and institutions about individuals and legal entities in a central database were revealed under the previous government, and the current government wants to revive them, the article says. It argues that the way data are collected, linked, shared and secured is a reason for concern.