Prior research found that a significant portion of EU-based websites responded to the GDPR by implementing privacy dialogs that contained inadequate consent options or dark patterns nudging visitors towards accepting tracking. Less attention, so far, has been devoted to capturing the evolution of those privacy dialogs over time. We study the evolution of privacy dialogs for a period of 18 months after the GDPR became effective using screenshots from the homepages of 911 US and EU news and media websites. We assess the impact of government and third-party actions that provided additional guidance and tools for compliance on privacy dialogs' choice architecture. Over time, we observe an increase in the use of privacy dialogs providing the option to accept or reject tracking, and a reduction of nudges that encourage users to accept tracking. While the debate over the extent to which various stakeholders' responses to the GDPR meaningfully improved EU residents' privacy remains open, our results suggest that exogenous shocks (such as government interventions) may prompt websites to enact changes that bring on-the-ground implementation of the GDPR at least nominally closer to its intended goals (such as making rejecting tracking easier for visitors).
more »
« less
The Privacy Policy Landscape After the GDPR
Abstract The EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is one of the most demanding and comprehensive privacy regulations of all time. A year after it went into effect, we study its impact on the landscape of privacy policies online. We conduct the first longitudinal, in-depth, and at-scale assessment of privacy policies before and after the GDPR. We gauge the complete consumption cycle of these policies, from the first user impressions until the compliance assessment. We create a diverse corpus of two sets of 6,278 unique English-language privacy policies from inside and outside the EU, covering their pre-GDPR and the post-GDPR versions. The results of our tests and analyses suggest that the GDPR has been a catalyst for a major overhaul of the privacy policies inside and outside the EU. This overhaul of the policies, manifesting in extensive textual changes, especially for the EU-based websites, comes at mixed benefits to the users. While the privacy policies have become considerably longer, our user study with 470 participants on Amazon MTurk indicates a significant improvement in the visual representation of privacy policies from the users’ perspective for the EU websites. We further develop a new workflow for the automated assessment of requirements in privacy policies. Using this workflow, we show that privacy policies cover more data practices and are more consistent with seven compliance requirements post the GDPR. We also assess how transparent the organizations are with their privacy practices by performing specificity analysis. In this analysis, we find evidence for positive changes triggered by the GDPR, with the specificity level improving on average. Still, we find the landscape of privacy policies to be in a transitional phase; many policies still do not meet several key GDPR requirements or their improved coverage comes with reduced specificity.
more »
« less
- Award ID(s):
- 1838733
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10175840
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies
- Volume:
- 2020
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 2299-0984
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 47 to 64
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
null (Ed.)Cities have circumvented privacy norms and deployed sensors to track vehicles via toll transponders (like E-Zpass tags). The ethical problems regarding these practices have been highlighted by various privacy advocacy groups. The industry however, has yet to implement a standard privacy protection regime to protect users’ data. Further, existing risk management models do not adequately address user-controlled data sharing requirements. In this paper, we consider the challenges of protecting private data in the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) and mobile edge networks. Specifically, we present a privacy risk reduction model for electronic toll transponder data. We seek to preserve driver privacy while contributing to intelligent transportation infrastructure congestion automation schemes. We thus propose TollsOnly, a fully homomorphic encryption protocol. TollsOnly is expected to be a post-quantum privacy preservation scheme. It enables users to share specific data with smart cities via blockchain technology. TollsOnly protects driver privacy in compliance with the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act.more » « less
-
The European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) mandates a data controller (e.g., an app developer) to provide all information specified in Articles (Arts.) 13 and 14 to data subjects (e.g., app users) regarding how their data are being processed and what are their rights. While some studies have started to detect the fulfillment of GDPR requirements in a privacy policy, their exploration only focused on a subset of mandatory GDPR requirements. In this paper, our goal is to explore the state of GDPR-completeness violations in mobile apps' privacy policies. To achieve our goal, we design the PolicyChecker framework by taking a rule and semantic role based approach. PolicyChecker automatically detects completeness violations in privacy policies based not only on all mandatory GDPR requirements but also on all if-applicable GDPR requirements that will become mandatory under specific conditions. Using PolicyChecker, we conduct the first large-scale GDPR-completeness violation study on 205,973 privacy policies of Android apps in the UK Google Play store. PolicyChecker identified 163,068 (79.2%) privacy policies containing data collection statements; therefore, such policies are regulated by GDPR requirements. However, the majority (99.3%) of them failed to achieve the GDPR-completeness with at least one unsatisfied requirement; 98.1% of them had at least one unsatisfied mandatory requirement, while 73.0% of them had at least one unsatisfied if-applicable requirement logic chain. We conjecture that controllers' lack of understanding of some GDPR requirements and their poor practices in composing a privacy policy can be the potential major causes behind the GDPR-completeness violations. We further discuss recommendations for app developers to improve the completeness of their apps' privacy policies to provide a more transparent personal data processing environment to users.more » « less
-
Terms of service documents are a common feature of organizations' websites. Although there is no blanket requirement for organizations to provide these documents, their provision often serves essential legal purposes. Users of a website are expected to agree with the contents of a terms of service document, but users tend to ignore these documents as they are often lengthy and difficult to comprehend. As a step towards understanding the landscape of these documents at a large scale, we present a first-of-its-kind terms of service corpus containing 247,212 English language terms of service documents obtained from company websites sampled from Free Company Dataset. We examine the URLs and contents of the documents and find that some websites that purport to post terms of service actually do not provide them. We analyze reasons for unavailability and determine the overall availability of terms of service in a given set of website domains. We also identify that some websites provide an agreement that combines terms of service with a privacy policy, which is often an obligatory separate document. Using topic modeling, we analyze the themes in these combined documents by comparing them with themes found in separate terms of service and privacy policies. Results suggest that such single-page agreements miss some of the most prevalent topics available in typical privacy policies and terms of service documents and that many disproportionately cover privacy policy topics as compared to terms of service topics.more » « less
-
Mazurek, Michelle ; Sher, Micah (Ed.)more » « less
Web tracking by ad networks and other data-driven businesses is often privacy-invasive. Privacy laws, such as the California Consumer Privacy Act, aim to give people more control over their data. In particular, they provide a right to opt out from web tracking via privacy preference signals, notably Global Privacy Control (GPC). GPC holds the promise of enabling people to exercise their opt out rights on the web. Broad adoption of GPC hinges on its usability. In a usability survey we find that 94% of the participants would turn on GPC indicating a need for such efficient and effective opt out mechanism. 81% of the participants in our survey also have a correct understanding of what GPC does ensuring that their intent is accurately represented by their choice. The effectiveness of GPC is dependent on whether websites' GPC compliance can be enforced. A site's GPC compliance can be analyzed based on privacy flags, such as the US Privacy String, which is used on many sites to indicate the opt out status of a web user. Leveraging the US Privacy String for GPC purposes we implement a proof-of-concept browser extension that successfully and correctly analyzes sites' GPC compliance at a rate of 89%. We further implement a web crawler for our browser extension demonstrating that our analysis approach is scalable. We find that many sites do not respect GPC opt out signals despite being legally obligated to do so. Only 54/464 (12%) sites with a US Privacy String opt out users after having received a GPC signal.
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.2478/popets-2020-0004
