Improving the Representation Choices of Privacy Policies for End-Users

Paper in proceeding, 2023

Privacy policies provide users the possibility to get informed about how their data are being used by specific services and vendors. Unfortunately their texts are usually long and users are not devoting the required time to read them and understand their content. Tools that bring the privacy policies closer to the users can assist towards enhancing users’ privacy awareness. In this work, we are presenting the updated version of Privacy Policy Beautifier, our approach and accompanying tool that offers various representations of the privacy policy text, as a way to assist the users in better understanding the policy, devoting less time to explore its main content. Text highlighting, text summarization, word cloud, GDPR terms presence/absence are the techniques employed for the representations. The updated version of Privacy Policy Beautifier has been evaluated for its enhanced features via the participation of 32 users with promising results.