The answers of the TrustaWare Consortium experts
Privacy information policies, which regulated relations between users and websites, can be efficient communications tools to increase the trust of individuals, but they are often long, complex, and hard to understand due to the use of legal jargon and vague statements.
A surprising 36% of individuals admit to not reading privacy policies before accepting them, while 38% read them sometimes and only 8% is capable of understanding the content. Are privacy policies comprehensible in our experience?
A study has revealed that if an individual were to skim read all privacy policies they would require 19 days a year to do so. Other studies confirm the importance of these policies to ensure consumers that their data is protected, even if they are not read or understood.
How can we guarantee that privacy polices maintain their communicational potential and operate for the common good? By developing a framework for the analysis of privacy policy of organisations through deep learning techniques, Project Trust aWare aims to improve the trust of consumers in these confusing policies and allow them to distinguish trustworthy policies from those that are not.
A contribution by Aisling Dawson on the official project website blog addresses the ethical aspects of privacy, and the normative aspects regulated by the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Trust, as in “will to depend on” and reliability, as in “deserving trust,” are not the same, explains Aisling Dawson. The tools developed by Trust aWare provide consumers with an interactive visualisation of the most significant passages of these policies , so that they can better distinguish the reliable ones.
