Jump to content

Game-of-telephone privacy policy

From Consumer_Action_Taskforce

Article Status Notice: This Article is a stub

Notice: This Article Requires Additional Expansion

This article is underdeveloped, and needs additional work to meet the wiki's Content Guidelines and be in line with our Mission Statement for comprehensive coverage of consumer protection issues. Issues may include:

  • This article needs to be expanded to provide meaningful information
  • This article requires additional verifiable evidence to demonstrate systemic impact
  • More documentation is needed to establish how this reflects broader consumer protection concerns
  • The connection between individual incidents and company-wide practices needs to be better established
  • The article is simply too short, and lacks sufficient content

How You Can Help:

  • Add documented examples with verifiable sources
  • Provide evidence of similar incidents affecting other consumers
  • Include relevant company policies or communications that demonstrate systemic practices
  • Link to credible reporting that covers these issues
  • Flesh out the article with relevant information

This notice will be removed once the article is sufficiently developed. Once you believe the article is ready to have its notice removed, visit the Discord (join here) and post to the #appeals channel, or mention its status on the article's talk page.

⚠️ Article status notice: This article has been marked as incomplete

This article needs additional work to meet the wiki's Content Guidelines and be in line with our Mission Statement for comprehensive coverage of consumer protection issues.

This notice will be removed once sufficient documentation has been added to establish the systemic nature of these issues. Once you believe the article is ready to have its notice removed, visit the discord and post to the #appeals channel.

Learn more ▼

When a consumer reviews a privacy policy, this privacy policy is supposed to inform the consumer what data will be collected, and how the data will be used. A game-of-telephone privacy policy constitutes a situation whereby a consumer's agreement with an app developer may be different between the app developer's agreement with a third party. For instance:

  1. Third party says that data collected using their SDK can be used to determine insurance rates by insurance providers.
  2. Third party licenses SDK to app developer who agrees to these terms.
  3. App developer says to app user that application collects location data just to provide me in-app services & that it may be shared with third parties.
  4. App developer never discloses to app user that collected data will be used to determine app user's insurance rates.
  5. App developer does not meaningfully disclose relationship with third party in their terms of service.

This is akin to me agreeing with my friend James that we may engage in violent behavior. You become friends with my friend James. Therefore, as a result of your friendship with James, it becomes implied that you have agreed to violent behavior.

An excellent example of this would be the relationship between Arity (a business that sells data-collection SDKs), the mobile apps that use Arity SDKs, and the user of those mobile apps, mentioned in the Allstate Arity driver data theft case.