Privacy Policies of IoT Devices: Collection and Analysis

Area of Science:

• Computer Science
• Law
• Data Privacy

Background:

• Digital services extensively collect personal data for operation and personalization.
• Existing methods for analyzing privacy policies often require large datasets.
• Transparency in personal data processing is crucial for end-user comprehension of risks.

Purpose of the Study:

• To address the need for a comprehensive dataset of privacy policies for Internet of Things (IoT) devices.
• To develop and present a novel technique for collecting and cleaning these privacy policies.
• To facilitate research on enhancing the transparency of privacy policies for end users.

Main Methods:

• A new technique was developed to collect privacy policies, utilizing e-commerce platforms for targeted URL retrieval.
• A software tool was employed to gather a corpus of 592 unique English privacy policies.
• Statistical and semantic analysis was performed on the collected privacy policies.

Main Results:

• A novel corpus of 592 unique privacy policies, primarily for IoT devices, was successfully collected and curated.
• The collected policies reflect current legislative requirements for personal data processing.
• Initial statistical and semantic analyses of the corpus were conducted.

Conclusions:

• The developed technique offers an effective method for gathering relevant privacy policies for IoT devices.
• The new corpus provides a valuable resource for researchers studying privacy policy transparency.
• Further analysis of this dataset can lead to improved natural language processing techniques for privacy policies.