skip to main content
US FlagAn official website of the United States government
dot gov icon
Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.
https lock icon
Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( lock ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.


Title: PrivComp-KG: Leveraging KG and LLM for Compliance Verification
Regulatory documents are complex and lengthy, making full compliance a challenging task for businesses. Similarly, privacy policies provided by vendors frequently fall short of the necessary legal standards due to insufficient detail. To address these issues, we propose a solution that leverages a Large Language Model (LLM) in combination with Semantic Web technology. This approach aims to clarify regulatory requirements and ensure that organizations’ privacy policies align with the relevant legal frameworks, ultimately simplifying the compliance process, reducing privacy risks, and improving efficiency. In this paper, we introduce a novel tool, the Privacy Policy Compliance Verification Knowledge Graph, referred to as PrivComp-KG. PrivComp-KG is designed to efficiently store and retrieve comprehensive information related to privacy policies, regulatory frameworks, and domain-specific legal knowledge. By utilizing LLM and Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), we can accurately identify relevant sections in privacy policies and map them to the corresponding regulatory rules. Our LLM-based retrieval system has demonstrated a high level of accuracy, achieving a correctness score of 0.9, outperforming other models in privacy policy analysis. The extracted information from individual privacy policies is then integrated into the PrivComp-KG. By combining this data with contextual domain knowledge and regulatory rules, PrivComp-KG can be queried to assess each vendor’s compliance with applicable regulations. We demonstrate the practical utility of PrivComp-KG by verifying the compliance of privacy policies across various organizations. This approach not only helps policy writers better understand legal requirements but also enables them to identify gaps in existing policies and update them in response to evolving regulations.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
2348147
PAR ID:
10595647
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ; ; ;
Publisher / Repository:
IEEE
Date Published:
ISBN:
979-8-3503-8674-5
Page Range / eLocation ID:
97 to 106
Format(s):
Medium: X
Location:
Washington, DC, USA
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. Data privacy requirements are a complex and quickly evolving part of the data management domain. Especially in Healthcare (e.g., United States Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act and Veterans Affairs requirements), there has been a strong emphasis on data privacy and protection. Data storage is governed by multiple sources of policy requirements, including internal policies and legal requirements imposed by external governing organizations. Within a database, a single value can be subject to multiple requirements on how long it must be preserved and when it must be irrecoverably destroyed. This often results in a complex set of overlapping and potentially conflicting policies. Existing storage systems are lacking sufficient support functionality for these critical and evolving rules, making compliance an underdeveloped aspect of data management. As a result, many organizations must implement manual ad-hoc solutions to ensure compliance. As long as organizations depend on manual approaches, there is an increased risk of non-compliance and threat to customer data privacy. In this paper, we detail and implement an automated comprehensive data management compliance framework facilitating retention and purging compliance within a database management system. This framework can be integrated into existing databases without requiring changes to existing business processes. Our proposed implementation uses SQL to set policies and automate compliance. We validate this framework on a Postgres database, and measure the factors that contribute to our reasonable performance overhead (13% in a simulated real-world workload). 
    more » « less
  2. The development of tools and techniques to analyze and extract organizations’ data habits from privacy policies are critical for scalable regulatory compliance audits. Unfortunately, these tools are becoming increasingly limited in their ability to identify compliance issues and fixes. After all, most were developed using regulationagnostic datasets of annotated privacy policies obtained from a time before the introduction of landmark privacy regulations such as EU’s GDPR and California’s CCPA. In this paper, we describe the first open regulation-aware dataset of expert-annotated privacy policies, C3PA (CCPA Privacy Policy Provision Annotations), aimed to address this challenge. C3PA contains over 48K expert-labeled privacy policy text segments associated with responses to CCPA-specific disclosure mandates from 411 unique organizations. We demonstrate that the C3PA dataset is uniquely suited for aiding automated audits of compliance with CCPA-related disclosure mandates. 
    more » « less
  3. Rapid expansion in the manufacture and use of Internet of Things (IoT) devices has introduced significant challenges in ensuring compliance with cybersecurity standards. To protect user data and privacy, all organizations providing IoT devices must adhere to complex guidelines such as the National Institute of Standards and Technology Inter agency Report (NIST IR) 8259, which defines essential cybersecurity guidelines for IoT manufacturers. However, interpreting and applying these rules from these guidelines and the privacy policies remains a significant challenge for companies. Thus, this project presents a novel approach to extract knowledge from NIST 8259 for creating semantically rich ontology mappings. Our ontology captures key compliance rules, which are stored in a knowledge graph (KG) that allows organizations to crosscheck and update privacy policy documents with ease. The KG also enables real-time querying using SPARQL and offers a transparent view of regulatory adherence for IoT manufacturers and users. By automating the process of verifying cybersecurity compliance, the framework ensures that companies remain aligned with NIST standards, eliminating manual checks and reducing the risk of non-compliance. We also demonstrate that compared to the baseline Large Language Models (LLMs), our proposed framework has more compliance accuracy, and is more efficient and scalable. 
    more » « less
  4. The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and other recent privacy laws require organizations to post their privacy policies, and place specific expectations on organisations' privacy practices. Privacy policies take the form of documents written in natural language, and one of the expectations placed upon them is that they remain up to date. To investigate legal compliance with this recency requirement at a large scale, we create a novel pipeline that includes crawling, regex-based extraction, candidate date classification and date object creation to extract updated and effective dates from privacy policies written in English. We then analyze patterns in policy dates using four web crawls and find that only about 40% of privacy policies online contain a date, thereby making it difficult to assess their regulatory compliance. We also find that updates in privacy policies are temporally concentrated around passage of laws regulating digital privacy (such as the GDPR), and that more popular domains are more likely to have policy dates as well as more likely to update their policies regularly. 
    more » « less
  5. Most organizations rely on relational database(s) for their day-to-day business functions. Data management policies fall under the umbrella of IT Operations, dictated by a combination of internal organizational policies and government regulations. Many privacy laws (such as Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation and California’s Consumer Privacy Act) establish policy requirements for organizations, requiring the preservation or purging of certain customer data across their systems. Organization disaster recovery policies also mandate backup policies to prevent data loss. Thus, the data in these databases are subject to a range of policies, including data retention and data purging rules, which may come into conflict with the need for regular backups. In this paper, we discuss the trade-offs between different compliance mechanisms to maintain IT Operational policies. We consider the practical availability of data in an active relational database and in a backup, including: 1) supporting data privacy rules with respect to preserving or purging customer data, and 2) the application performance impact caused by the database policy implementation. We first discuss the state of data privacy compliance in database systems. We then look at enforcement of common IT operational policies with regard to database backups. We consider different implementations used to enforce privacy rule compliance combined with a detailed discussion for how these approaches impact the performance of a database at different phases. We demonstrate that naive compliance implementations will incur a prohibitively high cost and impose onerous restrictions on backup and restore process, but will not affect daily user query transaction cost. However, we also show that other solutions can achieve a far lower backup and restore costs at a price of a small (<5%) overhead to non-SELECT queries. 
    more » « less