LJ Index, March 2009

  1. Average number of minutes it takes to read an online privacy policy: 10
  2. Mean word count of privacy policies for the Web's most popular sites: 2,514
  3. Number of words in MySpace's Terms and Conditions: 3,868
  4. Number of words in the MySpace Terms and Conditions paragraph that says, "It is therefore important that you review this Agreement regularly to ensure you are updated as to any changes.": 65
  5. Number of websites visited by the average person per month: 119
  6. Number of hours it would take to read all privacy policies for 119 websites: 20
  7. Millions of Web users in the U.S.: 121.667
  8. Billions of hours per year that would be spent if every U.S. Web users read all website privacy policies: 44.3
  9. Estimated time cost in dollars per year, per U.S. Web user, for reading all website privacy policies: 3,000
  10. Estimated $billions in lost leisure and productivity time that would be cost by all U.S. website users reading all privacy policies: 365
  11. Millions of websites in Google's first index, in 1998: 26
  12. Billions of pages indexed by Google in 2000: 1
  13. Trillions of pages indexed by Google in 2009: 1
  14. Year in which lines of code in the Linux kernel will pass 6.5 million: 2009
  15. Millions of dollars it would have cost "by conventional proprietary means in the U.S." to have produced Red Hat Linux 6.2 in 2000: 600
  16. Billions of dollars it would have cost to produce Red Hat Linux 7.1 in 2002: 1
  17. Those same billions in 2008 dollars: 1.2
  18. Billions of dollars it would have cost to produce Fedora 9 in 2008: 10.8
  19. Billions of dollars it would have cost to the Linux kernel alone in 2008: 1.4
  20. Estimated billions of dollars spent by Microsoft on "Vista client operating software, Windows Server 2007 server software, Office 2007, Internet Explorer 7 and other related software: 14

Sources: 1-10, ArsTechnica, Carnegie Mellon CyLab, Out-Law.com, all sourcing "Cost of Reading Privacy Policies", by Carnegie Mellon researchers Aleecia McDonald and Lorrie Faith Cranor; 3-4, MySpace; 11-13, Jesse Alpert & Nissan Hajaj, Software Engineers, Google Web Search Infrastructure Team; 14, Greg Kroah-Hartman; 15-16, David A. Wheeler; 17-19, Amanda McPherson, Brian Proffitt, and Ron Hale-Evans of the Linux Foundation; 20, Dennis Byron.

Sources:

http://tprcweb.com/files/CostOfReadingPrivacyPolicies.pdf

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20081008-study-reading-online-privacy-policies-could-cost-365-billion-a-year.html

http://www.cylab.cmu.edu/news_events/cylab_news/privacy_policy.html

http://www.out-law.com/page-9490

http://www1.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=misc.terms

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/07/we-knew-web-was-big.html

http://www.kroah.com/log/linux/lpc_2008_keynote.html

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3385088017824733336

http://www.dwheeler.com/sloc/redhat71-v1/redhat71sloc.html

http://www.linuxfoundation.org/publications/estimatinglinux.php

http://seekingalpha.com/article/104365-microsoft-spending-on-vista-confirms-linux-foundation-theory