‘Free bottle of good wine’: How an NGO protested privacy policy pages on websites using a sneak attack freebie that went viral
How often do you read the terms and conditions, EULAs and privacy policies? While we know we should sift through the fine print, it’s something few of us ever do, and certainly not completely.
Nonprofit organization Tax Policy Associates wanted to prove how pointless these documents are, so in February 2024, they added a line to its privacy policy offering a “bottle of fine wine” to the first person who saw the offer and reached out.
After no one noticed the addition for three months, the reward was finally found by someone who stumbled upon it after looking at several examples of privacy policies online to get an idea of how to create their own.
Not the first time
The head of the organization, Dan Neidle, shared the story on X and told it BBC it was “my childish protest that all companies should have a privacy policy and no one reads it. Every little coffee shop should have a privacy policy on their website, it’s insane. It’s money being wasted.”
In the coverage, the most read story on the site, the BBC pointed out that any company that holds personal data, “including small businesses and charities”, must have a privacy policy under the UK General Data Protection Regulation 2018 (GDPR).
This is actually the second time that Tax Policy Associates has made a sneaky addition to its privacy policy. The first time it took four months before he was found. “We did it again to see if people were paying more attention and that’s not the case,” Neidle told the BBC.
The text in the company’s privacy policy has since been changed following the discovery and now says: ‘We know no one is reading this because we added in February that we would send a bottle of good wine to the first person who contacted us records, and it was not until May that we received an answer.”
If you’re wondering what counts as a ‘good’ bottle of wine in this case, the answer, according to the BBC, is: Château de Sales 2013/14, Pomerol.
Our ongoing experiment into whether anyone reads the website’s terms and conditions continues. We recorded this in our terms and conditions in February. Just claimed. pic.twitter.com/N7k3weTuA9May 9, 2024