As the privacy reform debate continues in Australia, the all too familiar rhetoric of businesses having to shoulder the cost of regulation is now echoing through many consultation processes. But what is it costing Australian consumers?

This report covers key insights from a privacy sweep undertaken in May 2024. Over a 24-hour period, nine participants located and adjusted the privacy settings of every website or app they engaged with, timing how long each action took. Participants also located and logged the word count of the privacy policies of the apps and websites they were using to help calculate average reading time for those policies.

Placing the burden on individuals to manage their privacy settings is not working for Australians. The federal government needs to shift the burden far further towards businesses, who are ultimately creating, embedding and profiteering from data hungry business models.

Key insights

• Australians need to carve out approximately 30 minutes every day just to adjust their privacy settings.
• This is in addition to dedicating on average 14 hours just to read the privacy policies of the sites and apps used in one day.
• Some of the longest privacy policies were in excess of 300,000 words.