Ask HN: Why aren't privacy policies standardised like licenses

[raghavtoshniwal]

Open Source solved the licensing problem by standardising around different flavours of licenses like Apache, GPL, Creative Commons etc.

You could still go and create your own License but its standard practice to just pick one that suits best for you (if you’re not trying to do something weird)

Now you don’t have to go through each different license to know what is/isnt allowed.

Why haven’t we come to something similar for privacy policies. Is there some obvious reason I’m missing?

PS: If there isn’t a good reason for it, I’m interested in creating a schelling point of sorts for this, please let me know if this sounds interesting

[toast0]

P3P was that https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/P3P

[stop50]

An license that is like GPL(one size fits all) is not possible. But there are legal companies that provide forms that provide good templates for common usecases

[raghavtoshniwal → stop50]

It makes sense that one size fits all privacy policy wouldn’t be possible, but for most good faith actors, they collect data in same-ish patterns, and have same-ish privacy stances.

Why don’t we label and popularize them so consumers know what they’re getting into without having to parse the policy each time.

[Someone → raghavtoshniwal]

A good privacy policy isn’t long or hard to read. See for example the template that the EU provides at https://gdpr.eu/privacy-notice/