A Comparative Study of Sequence Classification Models for Privacy Policy Coverage Analysis

Abstract: Privacy policies are legal documents that describe how a website will collect, use, and distribute a user's data. Unfortunately, such documents are often overly complicated and filled with legal jargon; making it difficult for users to fully grasp what exactly is being collected and why. Our solution to this problem is to provide users with a coverage analysis of a given website's privacy policy using a wide range of classical machine learning and deep learning techniques. Given a website's privacy policy, the classifier identifies the associated data practice for each logical segment. These data practices/labels are taken directly from the OPP-115 corpus. For example, the data practice "Data Retention" refers to how long a website stores a user's information. The coverage analysis allows users to determine how many of the ten possible data practices are covered, along with identifying the sections that correspond to the data practices of particular interest.