Person rewarded bottle of wine after reading company’s entire privacy policy
FILE - Red wine being poured from a bottle. (ANTHONY WALLACE/AFP via Getty Images)
Sometimes reading the entire terms & conditions of a privacy policy pays off – at least it did for one person.
Tax Policy Associates, a tax-focused think tank website, hid a clause in its privacy policy to see if anyone actually read those things.
The clause promised a free bottle of "good wine" to whomever read the full terms and recognized the out-of-place clause.
It was published in February and someone has only just now claimed the reward three months later.
Dan Neidle, founder of Tax Policy Associates, shared the results of the experiment on his X, formerly known as Twitter, account.
"We know nobody reads this, because we added in February that we’d send a bottle of good wine to the first person to contact us, and it was only in May that we got a response," the website read.
Neidle told BBC that the person who spotted the clause "kind of cheated" as they were actually using Neidle’s company’s privacy policy as a template for their own and just happened upon the free bottle of wine portion.
The lucky reader ended up getting a bottle of Château de Sales 2013/14, Pomerol for finding the clause.
This isn’t the first time Neidle’s company tested how thorough people can be, according to a BBC report.
Two years ago, when Neidle first launched his company, he created a similar experiment and it took about four months for someone to realize it.
This story was reported from Los Angeles.