socially damaging

To make matters worse, companies also rely on manipulative design tricks to wheedle people into spending more time on a service, spending more money, or providing more data than they intended. When we blame people for violations of their privacy because they didn’t read a privacy policy or because they generally rely on digital services, we are blaming them for failing to make meaningful privacy choices in an ecosystem that is designed to make these choices functionally impossible.

In an illustration of how ill-matched the idea of privacy policies are with reality, a 2008 study found it would take the average American 40 minutes a day to read every privacy policy they encountered, at a cost of up to $5,038 a year in lost productivity.