Shomir Wilson, Pennsylvania State University; Florian Schaub, University of Michigan; Lee Matheson, Future of Privacy Forum; Shahriar Shayesteh, Pennsylvania State University; Lu Xian, University of Michigan
Privacy policies provide insight into organizations' data processing practices, but the wealth of privacy policies available on the web contrasts with the challenges of understanding the state of digital privacy at scale. We report on progress made by the PrivaSeer Project (https://privaseer.ist.psu.edu/) to build large-scale, longitudinal, annotated, and usable resources for the study of website privacy policies. These resources are aimed at privacy researchers, practitioners, and policymakers, a set of groups with varying technical backgrounds and analysis goals. We describe the PrivaSeer Corpus, the largest to-date publicly available corpus of privacy policies, and PrivaSeer Search, a search engine that makes browsing and exploring the corpus easy for a variety of stakeholders. We also summarize analysis of privacy policy availability, languages privacy policies are written in, and the prevalence of dates in privacy policies. These results provide a large-scale snapshot of the contents of privacy policies, with implications for their usability and legal compliance.
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