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PrivacyCheck v3: Empowering Users with Higher-Level Understanding of Privacy Policies

Published: 15 February 2022 Publication History

Abstract

Online privacy policies are lengthy and hard to read, yet are profoundly important as they communicate the practices of an organization pertaining to user data privacy. Privacy Enhancing Technologies, or PETs, seek to inform users by summarizing these privacy policies. Efforts in the research and development of such PETs, however, have largely been limited to tools that recap the policy or visualize it. We present the next generation of our research and publicly available tool, PrivacyCheck v3, that utilizes machine learning to inform and empower users with respect to privacy policies. PrivacyCheck v3 adds capabilities that are commonly absent from similar PETs on the web. In particular, it adds the ability to (1) find the competitors of an organization with Alexa traffic analysis and compare policies across them, (2) follow privacy policies to which the user has agreed and notify the user when policies change, (3) track policies over time and report how often policies change and their trends, (4) automatically find privacy policies in domains, and (5) provide a bird's-eye view of privacy policies. The new features of PrivacyCheck not only inform users about details of privacy policies, but also empower them to understand privacy policies at a higher level, make informed decisions, and even select competitors with better privacy policies.

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MP4 File (PrivacyCheck_WSDM_final.mp4)
Just about everyone in modern society uses the internet nowadays due to the convenience it offers, yet it is not without hidden dangers to user privacy and data security. Maybe if the privacy policies weren?t pages and pages long, people would be more aware of just what they are consenting to by using certain websites. The Center for Identity at the University of Texas at Austin presents PrivacyCheck v3, a browser extension that can help users better understand and compare the privacy policies that they consent to when surfing the web. Six new features aimed at enhancing user experience are covered. The ultimate goal of this technology is to enable higher level comprehension of privacy policies to make informed decisions, and to allow users to access competitors who may offer better privacy options.

References

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Cited By

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  • (2025)Safeguarding Individuals and Organizations From Privacy Breaches: A Comprehensive Review of Problem Domains, Solution Strategies, and Prospective Research DirectionsIEEE Internet of Things Journal10.1109/JIOT.2024.348131612:2(1247-1265)Online publication date: 15-Jan-2025
  • (2024)User Privacy Risk Analysis within Website Privacy Policies2024 International Conference on Multimedia Analysis and Pattern Recognition (MAPR)10.1109/MAPR63514.2024.10660854(1-6)Online publication date: 15-Aug-2024
  • (2024)Policy Peek: Privacy Policy Automatic Analysis Tool2024 International Conference on Electrical, Computer and Energy Technologies (ICECET10.1109/ICECET61485.2024.10698132(1-6)Online publication date: 25-Jul-2024
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cover image ACM Conferences
WSDM '22: Proceedings of the Fifteenth ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining
February 2022
1690 pages
ISBN:9781450391320
DOI:10.1145/3488560
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 15 February 2022

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Author Tags

  1. privacy enhancing technologies
  2. privacy policy
  3. privacycheck
  4. usable privacy

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Cited By

View all
  • (2025)Safeguarding Individuals and Organizations From Privacy Breaches: A Comprehensive Review of Problem Domains, Solution Strategies, and Prospective Research DirectionsIEEE Internet of Things Journal10.1109/JIOT.2024.348131612:2(1247-1265)Online publication date: 15-Jan-2025
  • (2024)User Privacy Risk Analysis within Website Privacy Policies2024 International Conference on Multimedia Analysis and Pattern Recognition (MAPR)10.1109/MAPR63514.2024.10660854(1-6)Online publication date: 15-Aug-2024
  • (2024)Policy Peek: Privacy Policy Automatic Analysis Tool2024 International Conference on Electrical, Computer and Energy Technologies (ICECET10.1109/ICECET61485.2024.10698132(1-6)Online publication date: 25-Jul-2024
  • (2023)Understanding Website Privacy Policies—A Longitudinal Analysis Using Natural Language ProcessingInformation10.3390/info1411062214:11(622)Online publication date: 19-Nov-2023
  • (2023)Security and Privacy of Digital Mental Health: An Analysis of Web Services and Mobile AppsSSRN Electronic Journal10.2139/ssrn.4469981Online publication date: 2023
  • (2023)Privacy Policies across the Ages: Content of Privacy Policies 1996–2021ACM Transactions on Privacy and Security10.1145/359015226:3(1-32)Online publication date: 13-May-2023
  • (2022)Detecting Privacy Policies Violations Using Natural Language Inference (NLI)2022 IEEE Asia-Pacific Conference on Computer Science and Data Engineering (CSDE)10.1109/CSDE56538.2022.10089347(1-6)Online publication date: 18-Dec-2022

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