In recent years, government privacy regulations have been passed with more stringent enforcement to increase transparency for consumers. To be compliant with the new regulations, companies are required to have a privacy policy explaining how the company uses consumer data, what data they collect, what data they store, and 3rd party uses. In addition to the uses of data, three major privacy regulations, the CCPA, COPPA, and the GDPR, have varying provisions relating to the language complexity of the privacy policies. This research assessed if these provisions are met by comparing the readability scores of apps found in a 2018 study to their 2021 counterparts. The hypothesis is that the 2021 privacy policies are more complex than 2018 privacy policies, using readability scores to measure document complexity. This research found that the readability of the 2021 policies was more difficult than the readability of the 2018 policies in all recorded measures (Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level, Flesch-Kincaid Reading Ease, Gunning FOG, SMOG, word count). These results show the increasing complexity of the privacy policies, which is significant because as the policies get more complicated, less readers can be expected to understand the language of these policies. Further, knowing that users cannot be reasonably expected to understand privacy policies changes the purpose of the documents from promoting transparency to predominantly compliance with the laws.
