Annotating Privacy Policies in the Sharing Economy

TL;DR

This paper presents an automated method to annotate privacy policies in the Digital Sharing Economy, making them more understandable for users and aiding developers in creating clearer policies.

Contribution

It introduces a novel automated approach for annotating privacy policies in DSE apps, linking data collection claims to app quality features and providing visual and textual explanations.

Findings

Annotations improve policy comprehensibility for users

Method is effective with 18 DSE app users

Helps developers draft clearer privacy policies

Abstract

Applications (apps) of the Digital Sharing Economy (DSE), such as Uber, Airbnb, and TaskRabbit, have become a main enabler of economic growth and shared prosperity in modern-day societies. However, the complex exchange of goods, services, and data that takes place over these apps frequently puts their end-users' privacy at risk. Privacy policies of DSE apps are provided to disclose how private user data is being collected and handled. However, in reality, such policies are verbose and difficult to understand, leaving DSE users vulnerable to privacy intrusive practices. To address these concerns, in this paper, we propose an automated approach for annotating privacy policies in the DSE market. Our approach identifies data collection claims in these policies and maps them to the quality features of their apps. Visual and textual annotations are then used to further explain and justify these claims. The proposed approach is evaluated with 18 DSE app users. The results show that annotating privacy policies can significantly enhance their comprehensibility to the average DSE user. Our findings are intended to help DSE app developers to draft more comprehensible privacy policies as well as help their end-users to make more informed decisions in one of the fastest growing software ecosystems in the world.