Big Data Analytics, Online Terms of Service and Privacy Policies

Abstract

In the digital era, consumers continuously use online services and apps for their daily activities. Too often, they do so without having a clear idea about what exactly they have agreed to or how their data is being used by the online platforms and service providers. This is because online terms of use and privacy policies are typically complex documents that are hard for the average citizen to decipher. In a sense, these terms of use and privacy policies are becoming “big data” collections themselves, representing an opportunity for new approaches in artificial intelligence and machine learning. For example, machine learning and artificial intelligence could be used to detect, extract, and categorize relevant information from the terms of use and privacy policies. In this chapter, we survey the research that addresses the recent efforts made to empower consumers via technologies that provide for the automated analysis of terms of service and privacy policies.

Keywords: big data, terms of service, privacy policy, automation, machine learning