cs4.407 Online Privacy

  Photo by Marija Zaric on Unsplash How many privacy policies have you accepted without knowing what the policy states? We're guessing that number is probably pretty high. And you are not alone. A  survey  of 2100 individuals conducted reported that 87% of individuals accept policies without reading them. Common reasons for this included the length and general readability of the policies. Of the top 500 websites, the average reading score was comparable to that of a high school student , while the average reading level of US adults is that of the 7th grade. Luckily, Natural Language Processing (NLP) can help. For our project, we set out to detect the readability of current privacy policies (spoiler alert: you'd need to have at least completed high school to make sense of what you agree to). We also wanted to see how we could make the readability of the policies better. So what did we do with the privacy policies? We used privacy policies from the  OPP-115 Corpus ...

The acclaimed Netflix documentary   The Social Dilemma   unveiled hidden machinations behind social media and its control over billions of users. For our generation, the millennials and gen Z, social media forms a very important aspect of our lives. Almost all our experiences make it to Instagram as pictures, or on Twitter as texts, or Facebook Posts or even on LinkedIn. Tristan Harris, the primary subject of the documentary, has spent his career studying how today's major technology platforms have increasingly become the social fabric by which we live and think, giving these platforms dangerous power over our ability to make sense of the world. Following in his footsteps of uncovering hidden security issues, our team (Ayushman Panda, Kancharla Aditya Hari, P. Sahithi Reddy, Pratishtha Abrol, Snehal Ranjan, and V.J.S. Pranavasri) came up with the idea of this project. Where You At attempts to gauge how a person's location information can be inferred from his posts online. Loca...

SiPP: Simple Privacy Policy     SiPP Introduction Privacy Policies are legal documents that are long and complex that enable the initiated to select their preferences and cripple the uninitiated into opting in by default into the conditions by the organizations to utilize their service.  In today's world, technology is an integral and influential part of most lives. While technology provides services, and to provide services, user-specific data that can be interpreted into information is crucial. Privacy policies are the means to collecting this data legally while providing services and monetizing the same for other incentives. [Trivia: in 2017, data became more valuable than Oil] For generalizing the privacy policies, universal guidelines are established.  FTC Privacy Principles OECD Principles Fair Information Practice Principles We introduce SiPP, Simple Privacy Policy, that enables you to take smaller bites into the privacy policies with ease by selecting cat...