Gigglebytes, June, 2003

“Sellyourmama.com knows that you care about how your personal information is used and shared. We value your privacy and we appreciate the trust you have placed in our company. At Sellyourmama.com we collect only the information necessary to provide you with our unique services, such as your name, email address, and a credit card number. We store this information on a secure server using SDRAWKCAB encryption technology. We do not share this information with any other company, nor do we use it within our own company for the purpose of sending unsolicited advertising e-mail or other solicitations to customers, potential customers, or any other oxygen-breathing bipeds with whom we have or do not have a business-like or retail-type relationship.”

This is traditionally followed by 93 other paragraphs no mortal human being has ever managed to read. (Some professionals, specially trained in boredom resistance, have tried. But they could never finish a statement before the Web site’s lawyers had rewritten it again.)

As a public service, Gigglebytes will also skip over paragraphs 2 through 94. In their place, we now offer the first paragraph of a typical Web site privacy policy—annotated:

Sellyourmama.com knows that you care about how your personal information is used and shared.
So you saw a link on our home page labeled “Privacy;” did you have to go and click it? Why can’t you be more like the 90% of our customers who couldn’t care less about how their personal information is used and shared? Wasn’t it reassuring enough just to see that the link was there?

We value your privacy…
It is an important and profitable asset which we plan to turn into a very lucrative revenue stream.

…and we appreciate the trust you have placed in our company.
By clicking the OK button at the bottom of this page, your trust in us is legally binding. In fact, your trust is binded to us if you click the Cancel button, use any of your browser’s navigation tools, or get up and just walk away.

At Sellyourmama.com we collect only the information necessary to provide you with our unique services…
These services include excellent products, reasonable prices, and astronomical shipping fees. For those not-particularly-rare cases where we ship the wrong product or keep our prices competitive by not shipping anything at all, we also offer a customer service line staffed by professionals carefully trained to make you hang up in frustration.

…such as your name, email address, and a credit card number.
Also your reading habits, eating disorders, and how you voted in the past six elections.

There is, of course, a significant amount of public information that we cannot attain from our Web site. This is why Sellyourmama.com maintains a staff of private investigators.

We store this information on a secure server using SDRAWKCAB encryption technology.
Hackers have been known to spend minutes trying to break information encoded through SDRAWKCAB (Special Dynamic Reversal Algorithm for Words Kryptically Coded to Appear Baffling). But they eventually realize that SDRAWKCAB-encoded text is standard English with each word spelled backwards.

Sellyourmama.com eventually plans to switch to the even more secure SDRAWKCAB 2.0, which double-scrambles the words. After reversing the letters in each word once, it extra-encrypts them by reversing the letters again.

We do not share this information with any other company…
Share? If someone comes to us wanting any of our precious data on you and your family, they’re going to have to pay.

…nor do we use it within our own company for the purpose of sending unsolicited advertising e-mail…
This promise, which after all says “nor do we…,” not “nor will we…,” is restricted entirely to the present tense. It was kept the day that this notice was posted to the Sellyourmama.com Web site. We can’t speak for the day before or the day after.

Also, the term “our own company” does not refer to any subsidiaries of Sellyourmama.com (in the unlikely event that there ever are any), or to whatever company buys our assets after Sellyourmama.com inevitably turns belly-up and goes to Internet-company heaven. At that time, these assets will consist of nothing but a few office chairs and your private information.

Also, since all of our advertising e-mail attempts to solicit purchases out of you, none of it is unsolicited.

or other solicitations to customers, potential customers, or any other oxygen-breathing bipeds with whom we have or do not have a business-like or retail-type relationship.”
We have now increased both the size of our sentences and the complexity of our words. Please accept this as a signal that it is time to stop reading something too long and boring to bother with and go back to giving us money.