Privacy Policy Readability: 30 Popular Apps Scored

We scored the privacy policies of 30 widely used apps and services with the six formulas in our readability checker. The median policy reads at about grade 12.1, and 16 of the 30 score at grade 12 or higher. None scores at grade 8 or below. Reading all of them means getting through 220,946 words.

Policies read on 6 November 2026 · re-scored each quarter

Key findings

• Grade 12.1 is typical. The median consensus grade is 12.1. The easiest policy, Spotify, scores 9.2. The hardest, Netflix, scores 15.4.
• 28 of 30 score below 50 on Flesch Reading Ease. Flesch labelled that range "Difficult", and below 30 "Very Difficult" (3 policies). The median score is 41.4.
• None reaches Microsoft's suggested range. Microsoft suggests a Flesch Reading Ease of 60 to 70 for most documents (see what is a good readability score). The highest here is Telegram at 53.6.
• Length varies widely. The median policy is 6,485 words. The longest, Microsoft (Windows, Outlook, Teams), is 33,556 words. The shortest, Signal, is 529 words, yet it still scores grade 11.7. A short policy is not automatically an easy one.

Download the table as CSV, with sentence counts, policy links and unrounded scores. Free to reuse under CC BY 4.0 with a link to this page.

How to read the table

Flesch is Flesch Reading Ease, from 0 to 100, where higher is easier. The other five columns are US school grades, where lower is easier. Consensus is the mean of all six as grades, with Flesch Reading Ease converted to a grade first. The Level band uses the calculator's labels: grade 8 or below is middle school or easier, 9 to 12 is high school, 13 to 16 is college. The formulas page explains each score.

A grade is not a measure of whether a policy is honest, complete or fair. It says how long the sentences are and how long the words are. A policy can score well and still be vague, or score badly because it spells out every detail.

Methodology

Which policies. The list is ours: 30 apps and services that many US consumers use, across social media, messaging, shopping, travel, money, entertainment and software. It is not a ranking of the most-used apps. Each row is one policy document, so Facebook and Instagram share Meta's policy. PayPal's site refused our automated browser, so its row is Venmo's own privacy statement. Microsoft's statement includes its product-specific sections, which is why it is so long.

How the text was collected. Each policy was opened in Chrome in its US English version on the date shown. Collapsed sections were opened. The text runs from the policy's title or effective date to its last line. Menus, footers, cookie banners and other documents on the same page are left out. Policy text is not stored or republished here: only the counts and scores are kept.

How it was scored. Every number comes from the same engine as the calculator, with no smoothing. Each line of a page was treated as its own paragraph, so a heading or list item without a full stop does not run into the next sentence. That means list-heavy policies have shorter sentences on average and score a little easier. Other calculators split sentences and count syllables differently, so they will give different numbers.

Check a number yourself. Open the policy from its row, copy the text and paste it into the calculator. Expect small differences if you copy a slightly different stretch of the page, or if the company has changed the policy since the date shown.

Updates. The policies are re-read and re-scored each quarter, and the date at the top changes with them. Companies revise their policies often, so a row can move between updates.

See also: famous text readability benchmarks, from the Gettysburg Address to a software license. Want an app added? Email [email protected].