Privacy policies are often overlooked. Pew Research reports that “more than half of Americans (56%) say they always, almost always, or often click ‘agree’ without reading privacy policies.” 1 Consequently, users may consent to terms without knowing what they are actually agreeing to. This simple “agree” interaction has become habitual in everyday digital life, outweighing careful consideration.
Privacy Policy Printer is a thermal receipt printer that prints the privacy policies of online services—documents that users routinely agree to without reading. This printer allows users to interact with the work by selecting different services and printing the selected policy, and to review these texts as physical receipts, similar to those reviewed after everyday purchases.
By transforming digital agreements into a tangible format, the work humorously exaggerates the volume of legal text embedded in daily online interactions. Once printed in physical form, the policies’ excessive length becomes difficult to ignore, revealing what they actually consent to.
The work poses a simple question:
What does it mean to “agree” to digital texts that are so often ignored?
Privacy Policy Printer is built using a Raspberry Pi computer as the central controller, connected to a mini thermal receipt printer through a serial communication interface. The system runs a Python program that retrieves and extracts online privacy policies from services such as Google and Facebook using the Python Requests library and the Beautiful Soup parsing library. The command-line interface displays a title banner, a selection menu to choose an online service, and a live progress bar that shows the status of each printing job. Communication with the thermal printer is managed through the Python Serial library. A dedicated external numeric keypad is connected to the computer, allowing users to operate the system using only number keys and the Enter key to select which service’s policy to print. Once a user enters a number associated with an online service and presses Enter, the selected privacy policy text begins printing on the thermal receipt printer.
Project Page | Don S. Quai | Instagram | YouTube
Artwork by Don S. Quai
Cinematographer: Sam Noh
