Andrick Adhikari (University of Denver), Sanchari Das (University of Denver), Rinku Dewri (University of Denver)

The effectiveness of natural language privacy policies continues to be clouded by concerns surrounding their readability, ambiguity, and accessibility. Despite multiple design alternatives proposed over the years, natural language policies are still the primary format for organizations to communicate privacy practices to users. Current NLP techniques are often drawn towards generating high-level overviews, or specialized towards a single aspect of consumer privacy communication; the flexibility to apply them for multiple tasks is missing. To this aid, we present PolicyPulse, an information extraction pipeline designed to process privacy policies into usable formats. PolicyPulse employs a specialized XLNet classifier, and leverages a BERT-based model for semantic role labeling to extract phrases from policy sentences, while maintaining the semantic relations between predicates and their arguments. Our classification model was trained on 13,946 manually annotated semantic frames, and achieves a F1-score of 0.97 on identifying privacy practices communicated using clauses within a sentence. We emphasize the versatility of PolicyPulse through prototype applications to support requirement-driven policy presentations, question-answering systems, and privacy preference checking.

View More Papers

UI-CTX: Understanding UI Behaviors with Code Contexts for Mobile...

Jiawei Li (Beihang University & National University of Singapore), Jiahao Liu (National University of Singapore), Jian Mao (Beihang University), Jun Zeng (National University of Singapore), Zhenkai Liang (National University of Singapore)

Read More

A Comprehensive Memory Safety Analysis of Bootloaders

Jianqiang Wang (CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security), Meng Wang (CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security), Qinying Wang (Zhejiang University), Nils Langius (Leibniz Universität Hannover), Li Shi (ETH Zurich), Ali Abbasi (CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security), Thorsten Holz (CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security)

Read More

Detecting Ransomware Despite I/O Overhead: A Practical Multi-Staged Approach

Christian van Sloun (RWTH Aachen University), Vincent Woeste (RWTH Aachen University), Konrad Wolsing (RWTH Aachen University & Fraunhofer FKIE), Jan Pennekamp (RWTH Aachen University), Klaus Wehrle (RWTH Aachen University)

Read More

The (Un)usual Suspects – Studying Reasons for Lacking Updates...

Maria Hellenthal (CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security), Lena Gotsche (CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security), Rafael Mrowczynski (CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security), Sarah Kugel (Saarland University), Michael Schilling (CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security), Ben Stock (CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security)

Read More