Title

Analyzing Privacy Policies At Scale: From Crowdsourcing To Automated Annotations

Keywords

Crowdsourcing; Human computer interaction (HCI); Machine learning; Natural language processing; Privacy; Privacy policies

Abstract

Website privacy policies are often long and difficult to understand. While research shows that Internet users care about their privacy, they do not have the time to understand the policies of every website they visit, and most users hardly ever read privacy policies. Some recent efforts have aimed to use a combination of crowdsourcing, machine learning, and natural language processing to interpret privacy policies at scale, thus producing annotations for use in interfaces that inform Internet users of salient policy details. However, little attention has been devoted to studying the accuracy of crowdsourced privacy policy annotations, how crowdworker productivity can be enhanced for such a task, and the levels of granularity that are feasible for automatic analysis of privacy policies. In this article, we present a trajectory of work addressing each of these topics. We include analyses of crowdworker performance, evaluation of a method to make a privacy-policy oriented task easier for crowdworkers, a coarse-grained approach to labeling segments of policy text with descriptive themes, and a fine-grained approach to identifying user choices described in policy text. Together, the results from these efforts show the effectiveness of using automated and semi-automated methods for extracting from privacy policies the data practice details that are salient to Internet users' interests. 2018 Copyright is held by the owner/author(s).

Publication Date

12-1-2018

Publication Title

ACM Transactions on the Web

Volume

13

Issue

1

Document Type

Article

Personal Identifier

scopus

DOI Link

https://doi.org/10.1145/3230665

Socpus ID

85058278785 (Scopus)

Source API URL

https://api.elsevier.com/content/abstract/scopus_id/85058278785

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