Unless you speak lawyerese as a second language, a Web site's privacy policy can seem as incomprehensible as the loudspeakers on New York City subways.

The organization behind Firefox, the world's second most popular Web browser, has embarked on an ambitious project to change this. Instead of forcing people concerned about privacy to scroll through pages of "notwithstanding anything to the contrary," the Mozilla Foundation is designing a standard set of colored icons to reveal how data-protective--or how intrusive--Web sites are.

It does seem a bit odd that, in the era of the iPad and cars that nearly drive themselves, technologists have been unable to puzzle out a better way to display that privacy information. The Mozilla Foundation's tentative solution is to employ the leverage it has through Firefox, used by something like 350 million people worldwide, to convince publishers to disclose their privacy practices in a standard way that would be displayed in a Web browser's address bar.

More: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10445642-38.html