Aiming to correct the privacy imbalance between consumers and businesses, a group of academics released a tool that uses automation and machine learning to mine privacy policies and deliver easy-to-use options for a consumer to limit a company's use of data.
The browser plug-in, called Opt-Out Easy, is the brainchild of a group of researchers from Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Michigan, Stanford University, and Penn State University and represents the latest shift on the status quo in data collection. The groups have analyzed a large number of privacy policies with machine learning algorithms to identify the actionable choices users can take using those policies.
The goal of the tool is to allow consumers to easily apply their own privacy wishes to any website they visit, says Norman Sadeh, a CyLab researcher and professor in Carnegie Mellon’s School of Computer Science.
"Privacy regulations are a great step forward because you need to offer people choices," he says. "On the other hand, what good are those choices to anyone if engaging with these policies is too burdensome? Right now we don't see a lot of people making privacy decisions because they don't know they can."
The tool represents the latest potential disruption to the data economy that businesses may have to contend with this year.
In the past three years, new regulations — such as the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (CDPR) and the California Consumer Protection Act (CCPA) — have come into force, driving ever-larger fines for data breaches and privacy violations. In addition, new technologies, such as shifting privacy landscape disruptive technologies businesses
