Somebody Finally Reads Website's Privacy Policy, and It Pays Off

In a "childish protest that all businesses have to have a privacy policy and no one reads it," the head of a UK nonprofit slipped in wording out of left field to see whether anyone would notice. "We'll send a bottle of good wine to the first person to read this" was placed in the middle of a paragraph about cookies and advertising, language required under the General Data Protection Regulation. For three months, the offer just sat there, the BBC reports. Then someone sent a sheepish email to Tax Policy Associates saying the wine probably was gone. It wasn't, so off went a bottle of Château de Sales 2013/14, Pomerol.

Dan Neidle, who posted the copy block on X, said Van Halen deserves credit for the idea. The band used to ask for a bowl of M&Ms with all the brown ones removed in its tour rider, he said, to see if anyone was paying attention to the technical instructions in the document. "It was a brilliant strategy," Neidle said. The wine winner wasn't quite what he had in mind, though. It turned out to be someone trying to write a privacy policy and so was actually reading examples from other organizations. (More privacy policy stories.)