"I have read the privacy policy"

If you are like me, scrolling through all the legalese when installing software is a pain. Mostly I just take a look at the first few boilerplate paragraphs and check the box.

Today I was installing a Life360 app on my phone. I got a tracker "tile" for car keys as a gift and you need to install the app, which uses Bluetooth, in order to track the tile.

The privacy policy seemed to go on forever on the tiny phone screen, so I got curious about how long it actually was. I went to the company's website with a real computer and copied and pasted the privacy policy into a temporary text document so I could get a word count:

I may have missed a couple of hundred words in the multi-column tables...

I then posed the following question on you.com:

How many words are there in an average short story?

Here is the answer:

Average Word Count of a Short Story

The average short story typically contains between 5,000 and 10,000 words. This range is widely accepted in the publishing industry, with many sources noting that stories under 1,000 words are considered flash fiction, while those above 10,000 words start to enter novelette territory. Some sources specify that 7,000 words is a pretty average story length for a short story. Others mention that short stories published in magazines and anthologies often range from about 1,000 to 7,500 words, but the most common average falls in the 5,000–7,500 word range.

Summary Table

Need I say more?