Construction of a Support Tool for Japanese User Reading of Privacy Policies and Assessment of its User Impact

• Published in: IEICE Transactions on Information and Systems Vol. E106.D; no. 5; pp. 856 - 867
• Main Authors: KANAMORI, Sachiko, SATO, Hirotsune, TABATA, Naoya, NOJIMA, Ryo
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Tokyo The Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers 01.05.2023; Japan Science and Technology Agency
• Subjects: Machine learning; natural language processing; Policies; Privacy; privacy policy; self-information control rights
• ISSN: 0916-8532; 1745-1361
• DOI: 10.1587/transinf.2022DAP0002

To protect user privacy and establish self-information control rights, service providers must notify users of their privacy policies and obtain their consent in advance. The frameworks that impose these requirements are mandatory. Although originally designed to protect user privacy, obtaining user consent in advance has become a mere formality. These problems are induced by the gap between service providers' privacy policies, which prioritize the observance of laws and guidelines, and user expectations which are to easily understand how their data will be handled. To reduce this gap, we construct a tool supporting users in reading privacy policies in Japanese. We designed the tool to present users with separate unique expressions containing relevant information to improve the display format of the privacy policy and render it more comprehensive for Japanese users. To accurately extract the unique expressions from privacy policies, we created training data for machine learning for the constructed tool. The constructed tool provides a summary of privacy policies for users to help them understand the policies of interest. Subsequently, we assess the effectiveness of the constructed tool in experiments and follow-up questionnaires. Our findings reveal that the constructed tool enhances the users' subjective understanding of the services they read about and their awareness of the related risks. We expect that the developed tool will help users better understand the privacy policy content and and make educated decisions based on their understanding of how service providers intend to use their personal data.