An Aston University researcher has suggested a more human-friendly way of reading websites' long-winded privacy notices. A team led by Dr. Vitor Jesus has developed a system of making them quicker and easier to understand by converting them into machine-readable formats.
This technique could allow the browser to guide the user through the document with recommendations or highlights of key points. Providing information is one of the key requirements of the UK General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the UK Data protection Act but trawling through them can be a tedious manual process. In 2012, The Atlantic magazine estimated it would take 76 days per year to diligently read privacy notices.
Privacy notices let people know what is being done with their data, how it will be kept safe if it's shared with anyone else and what will happen to it when it's no longer needed. However, the documents are written in non-computer, often legal language, so in the paper Feasibility of Structured, Machine-Readable Privacy Notices Dr. Jesus and his team explored the feasibility of representing privacy notices in a machine-readable format.
Dr. Jesus said, "The notices are essential to keep the public informed and data controllers accountable, however they inherit a pragmatism that was designed for different contexts such as software licenses or to meet the—perhaps not always necessary—verbose completeness of a legal contract. "And there are further challenges concerning updates to notic.