Consumers’ activities online and offline are being constantly tracked by a multitude of commercial organisations. This includes data about a consumer’s activities and purchases on websites and apps, relationship status, children, financial circumstances, life events, health concerns, search history, and location data.

Organisations describe types of information collected in ways that are confusing and unfamiliar for consumers — such as ‘pseudonymised’, ‘anonymised’, ‘hashed’, ‘audience data’, and ‘aggregated’. These descriptions do not have any definition in law nor any fixed meaning in practice. They also appear to suggest that the data in question is not related to the consumer as an individual and cannot be used to track, monitor, profile, single out, exclude, or influence the consumer when they certainly can.

It appears that much of this wording is designed to avoid consumers understanding or objecting to the collection and use of their personal information. This research confirms that consumers largely don’t understand the convoluted terms used by industry to describe when they will collect data and track someone’s activities.

Most consumers don’t recognise important categories of personal information that are used to track them, single them out and influence what they see online. This undermines the argument that consumers are making informed choices about personal data uses based on privacy notices. These notices are notoriously difficult for consumers to understand and provide negligible choices.

Key findings:

• Businesses use vague, confusing, and undefined terms in their privacy messaging that consumers can’t understand.
• Consumers don’t understand key types of information companies — including data brokers — can use to track,profile, and monitor them.
• Terms used in many privacy policies have no definition under Australian law and businesses use them inconsistently.