cs4.407 Online Privacy

Introduction Many websites collect, share, and use users’ Personally Identifiable Information (PII). Many regulatory bodies around the globe have long enforced requirements on posting privacy policies online. Over the past few decades, however, the collection, sharing, and usage of users' PII have risen to a major privacy concern over the internet, so much so that newer laws have gone into effect to protect user privacy. Prominent examples of such laws are the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the European Union and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) in the United States. Research has shown, time and again, that privacy policies are too long and hard to comprehend for their intended users, and therefore users rarely take the time and effort to read them. Privacy Policies are getting longer over time and increasingly difficult to read. To address the poor readability of privacy policies, we have developed tools that leverage machine learning (ML) to automatically s...

  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 ...