Usable Privacy Policy
Natural Language Processing and Computational Linguistics
By Noah Smith
Natural language privacy policies have become a de facto standard to address expectations of notice and choice on the web. Yet there is ample evidence that users generally do not read these policies, and that those who occasionally do struggle to understand what they read. Initiatives aimed at addressing this problem through the development of machine-implementable standards or other solutions that require website operators to adhere to more stringent requirements have run into obstacles, with many website operators showing reluctance to commit to anything beyond the status quo. This project combines fundamental research with the development of scalable technologies to semi-automatically extract key privacy policy features from natural language website privacy policies and present these features to users in an easy-to-digest format that enables them to make more informed privacy decisions as they interact with different websites.