Carnegie Mellon University

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May 19, 2021

What if opting out of data collection were easy?

New study shows dearth of privacy opt-out choices and offers solution to empower users to readily identify choices often buried deep in the text of privacy policies

By Daniel Tkacik

While many websites offer users choices to opt out of some of their data collection and use practices, most of these choices are buried deep in the text of long, jargon-filled privacy policies and are never seen by users.

Recent workby researchers in Carnegie Mellon University CyLab has shown that it is possible to use machine learning techniques to automatically extract and classify some of these opt-out choices. The results of this research were presented at the 2020 Web Conference.

The study also introduces Opt-Out Easy, a novel browser plug-in that automatically extracts opt-out choices from privacy policies and presents them to users in a friendly, easy-to-use manner. Opt-Out Easy is available for free download now for Chrome and Firefox.

“Different privacy regulations grant users the right to revoke how their data can be used by companies,” says CyLab’s Norman Sadeh, a professor in the School of Computer Science, and the principal investigator on the study. “But as it stands, most websites don’t offer users easy and practical access to these choices, effectively depriving them of these rights.”

In their study, Sadeh’s team trained a machine learning algorithm to scan privacy policies and identify language and links related to opt-out choices. They ran their algorithm on 7,000 of the most popular websites and found that over 3,600 of them (~ 51 percent) contain zero opt-out choices. A little over 800 (~ 11 percent) provide just one opt-out hyperlink.

“Our study aimed to provide an in-depth overview of whether popular websites allowed users the ability to opt out of some data collection and use practices,” Sadeh says. “In addition, we wanted to also develop a practical solution to help users access opt-out choices made available to them when such choices are present.”