Warning: This Site May Be Sharing Your Data

Aza Raskin, head of user experience at Mozilla, is leading a charge to make privacy settings more explicit to users by creating visual cues in the browser. Raskin’s idea uses a set of small icons to denote the limits of a website’s privacy policy. Raskin likens the idea to how Firefox (and other browsers) currently handle phishing attack warnings, using visual icons and simple language.

For the active social web user, keeping track of which bits of your data are public and which are private on different sites is a chore. Some websites share your photos, status updates, your list of friends, who you’re following and other data on the open web by default. Some share nothing. The rest are somewhere in the middle.

Part of the problem is the privacy policies themselves. They are complex, mind-numbingly long legal documents. We routinely ignore them, breezing past them by clicking “I agree.” Dangerous behavior, indeed.