Recognizing that relinquishing privacy rights is a lot more complicated than signing a release form to bungee jump, Carnegie Mellon University is leading a project to help consumers quickly comprehend the "the lengthy, often-confusing and subject-to-change" privacy policies now posted by major websites.
Working with law school researchers at Fordham and Stanford universities, computer scientists and behavioral economists at Carnegie Mellon will teach computer systems how to read and evaluate each website's privacy policies. Crowdsourcing will then be used to identify and extract those policy features that matter most to people.
Earlier attempts to encourage websites to post privacy policies in machine-readable language or to get website operators to abide by new rules have encountered "significant resistance." That inspired project leaders to develop a translator based on already available, "rarely read, plain English privacy policies."
With crowdsourcing itself unable to keep pace with changing policies, computers will be relied upon to routinely scan policies, even though computers can't yet understand all the nuances of human language.
"We are going to develop algorithms that can automatically or semi-automatically read a privacy policy well enough to answer a few questions likely to be of interest to many users and also to policymakers," said Noah Smith, associate professor of language technologies and machine learning at Carnegie Mellon, in a statement. "This is an exciting opportunity to apply recent developments in robust natural language processing to an everyday dilemma."
One goal is to develop user interfaces or browser add-ons that can summarize the pertinent privacy characteristics of a website in a way that is easily understood. This might be as simple as a letter grade, a color-coding, or other visualization to quickly indicate how each website privacy policy compares to a peer group.
"This gives, finally, power to customers to make informed decisions regarding what website they feel comfortable tracking them and which ones they don't," Norman Sadeh, a Carnegie Mellon professor of computer science and leader of the Usable Privacy Policy Project, told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
The 42-month, $3.75 million Usable Privacy Policy Project is sponsored by the National Science Foundation through its Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace (SaTC) program. It is one of three large Frontier awards the NSF recently announced in support of a more secure information society.