{Privacy, Privacidad, Приватност} Policies in Social Media: Providing Translated Privacy Notice

As online social media have become a global phenomenon, popular sites have been translated into many languages. However, since many social media sites rely on crowdsourced translation, privacy-critical pages are not always translated into all languages in which the sites are offered. In this paper, we examine whether or not privacy settings, privacy policies, and terms of service pages have been translated into each language available on five popular, global social networks: Facebook, Flickr, Google+, LinkedIn, and Twitter. We find large differences across sites in the availability of translated privacy pages. Some sites, such as Google+, offer privacy pages in a range of languages. In contrast, Facebook and Twitter’s privacy policies have been fully translated for only 14-15% of the languages in which the sites are offered. Since “notice” is a core principle of privacy, we argue that social media users who don’t speak English are not afforded complete privacy rights. We further assert that it should be the responsibility of the social networks, not the crowd, to ensure that privacy information is fully translated.