Privacy at Scale: Introducing the PrivaSeer Corpus of Web Privacy Policies

Mukund Srinath, Shomir Wilson, C Lee Giles


Abstract
Organisations disclose their privacy practices by posting privacy policies on their websites. Even though internet users often care about their digital privacy, they usually do not read privacy policies, since understanding them requires a significant investment of time and effort. Natural language processing has been used to create experimental tools to interpret privacy policies, but there has been a lack of large privacy policy corpora to facilitate the creation of large-scale semi-supervised and unsupervised models to interpret and simplify privacy policies. Thus, we present the PrivaSeer Corpus of 1,005,380 English language website privacy policies collected from the web. The number of unique websites represented in PrivaSeer is about ten times larger than the next largest public collection of web privacy policies, and it surpasses the aggregate of unique websites represented in all other publicly available privacy policy corpora combined. We describe a corpus creation pipeline with stages that include a web crawler, language detection, document classification, duplicate and near-duplicate removal, and content extraction. We employ an unsupervised topic modelling approach to investigate the contents of policy documents in the corpus and discuss the distribution of topics in privacy policies at web scale. We further investigate the relationship between privacy policy domain PageRanks and text features of the privacy policies. Finally, we use the corpus to pretrain PrivBERT, a transformer-based privacy policy language model, and obtain state of the art results on the data practice classification and question answering tasks.
Anthology ID:
2021.acl-long.532
Volume:
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
August
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Editors:
Chengqing Zong, Fei Xia, Wenjie Li, Roberto Navigli
Venues:
ACL | IJCNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
6829–6839
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.532
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.acl-long.532
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Mukund Srinath, Shomir Wilson, and C Lee Giles. 2021. Privacy at Scale: Introducing the PrivaSeer Corpus of Web Privacy Policies. In Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 6829–6839, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Privacy at Scale: Introducing the PrivaSeer Corpus of Web Privacy Policies (Srinath et al., ACL-IJCNLP 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.532.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.532.mp4