Do they really value your privacy?

An exploratory analysis of what can be learned about companies from their privacy statements

Master thesis (2019)

Authors

T.P. Rovers Technology, Policy and Management

Contributors

H. Asghari Organisation & Governance - TPM (mentor)
Martijn Warnier System Engineering - TPM (mentor)
Wouter Ernst Deloitte (coach)
Faculty
Technology, Policy and Management, Technology, Policy and Management
Copyright: © 2019 Tim Rovers
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Published Date

18-10-2019

Language

English

Reuse Rights

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Faculty

Technology, Policy and Management

Abstract

This master thesis explores to what degree information about a company's commitment to privacy can be extracted from a privacy statement. To do this, firstly a new database of more than 1500 privacy statements is created using Amazon Mechanical Turk. Next, 72 different aspects related to privacy of the statements are enumerated by using natural language processing. Multiple analyses are run on this data to look for signals which can indicate commitment to privacy. Ultimately, the analyses result in a number of ways which the quality and completeness can be assessed, and a method to find out the degree to which a privacy statement has likely copied other statements. This can be useful for privacy regulators in identifying companies which are less likely to comply with existing privacy regulations.

Files

Thesis_Tim_Rovers_Final.pdf
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