Simplifying Privacy Policies
Editing complex privacy content to create accessible, user-friendly communications.
CONTEXT
Privacy policies often contain dense legal language that can overwhelm or confuse users. My goal was to simplify and clarify excerpts from Wayfair’s privacy policy, focusing on improving readability, enhancing transparency, and fostering user trust while maintaining legal accuracy.
GOALS
Translate complex privacy terms into clear, accessible language
Preserve essential legal protections
Improve mobile readability and scannability
Empower users to better understand how their data is used
PROCESS
Conducted close reading of the original policy text
Identified sections with dense syntax, buried information, or repetitive phrasing
Applied plain language principles: shorter sentences, active voice, intuitive grouping
Prioritized transparency about data usage, anonymization practices, and marketing disclosures
Designed edits with mobile users in mind — optimizing for short, scannable blocks of information
ORIGINAL EXCERPT:
Improve, monitor, personalize, and protect our Services. It is in our legitimate business interests to improve and keep our Services safe for our users, which includes:
Understanding your needs and interests, and personalizing your experience with the Services and our communications.
Troubleshooting, testing, and research, and keeping the Services secure.
Investigating and protecting against fraudulent, harmful, unauthorized, or illegal activity.
Research and development. We may use personal information for research and development purposes in our legitimate business interests, including to analyze and improve the Services and our business, and to train our staff. As part of these activities, we may create or use aggregated, de-identified or other anonymized data from personal information we collect. We make personal information into anonymized data by removing information that makes the data personally identifiable to you. We may use this anonymized data and disclose it to third parties for our lawful business purposes, including to analyze and improve the Services and promote our business.
Marketing and advertising. We, our service providers, and our third-party advertising partners may collect and use personal information, including, subject to our Cookie Policy, information we may automatically collect from your use of the Services, for the following marketing and advertising purposes:
EDITED EXCERPT
Improving and Securing Our Services
We are committed to providing outstanding service while keeping your experience safe. This means:
Understanding your needs to improve our Services
Troubleshooting and researching ways to protect your data
Investigating and defending against fraud and other harmful activity
Research and Development
To improve our services, we may use your personal information for research and development. When this happens, we remove any details that could identify you, such as your name, contact information, or device ID. We may also share this anonymized data with our Partners to help us analyze trends and improve our business.
Marketing and Advertising
We and our Partners may collect and use personal information, including information automatically collected from your use of our Services (see our Cookie Policy), for the following marketing and advertising purposes:
OUTCOMES
Reduced sentence length and simplified structure, improving overall readability.
Improved flow for mobile users, increasing scannability and accessibility.
Preserved essential legal disclosures while making user rights and company practices easier to understand.
Built a clearer, more human-centered approach to communicating about personal data and user protections.
REFLECTION
This project reinforced the importance of transparency, structure, and plain language in fostering user trust. Effective privacy communication is not about oversimplification; it’s about empowering users to understand and control their own information. These skills are essential to ethical experience design and are at the core of how I approach writing for clarity, accessibility, and user empowerment.