Paper accepted in ACM Transactions on Privacy and Security
Our paper "Privacy Policies Across the Ages: Content of Privacy Policies 1996–2021" was just accepted for publication in ACM Transactions on Privacy and Security.
The paper uses machine learning and natural language processing to analyze the 25-year history of privacy policies. We find some positive changes, such as reductions in data collection post-GDPR, but also a range of concerning data practices, such as widespread implicit data collection for which users have no meaningful choices or access rights. The paper is an important step towards making privacy policies machine-readable on the user-side, which would allow users to match their privacy preferences against the policies offered by web services.
The paper is available online.
Isabel Wagner. 2023. Privacy Policies Across the Ages: Content of Privacy Policies 1996–2021. ACM Trans. Priv. Secur. Just Accepted (April 2023). https://doi.org/10.1145/3590152