Intro to Project

Privacy policies are a legal requirement for websites handling users’ data. So anyone should be able to access them, read them and understand what it takes (in terms of privacy) to be using a given service. Except no one reads them. User’s fault? Probably not. We can list several reasons:

1. A lot of people don’t even know what they are.
2. They are “legal documents”, and it takes a specific set of skills to comprehend them.
3. They are long and reading them would be time consuming (the median length is ~2500 words).

In short, they don’t seem to be designed for people to read and understand. But still, the content of these policies is very important to anyone’s privacy, for this is where you should learn what private data you agree to give away.

Privacy Bot is a project which aims at addressing aforementioned issues. If policies are not meant for humans, then maybe we can design a bot to automatically do the heavy lifting for us. The high level goals of the project are to:

1. Discover the privacy policy of any domain.
2. Automatically fetch and store them in a central place (eg: in a github repository, which will give us diffs on updates for free).
3. Analyze them to extract a summary of what private data is shared, and with whom.
4. Stay up-to-date by monitoring updates.
5. Make all the policies available in a central repository, in a usable data format that people can build upon (eg: building a browser extension to show the summary on any visited website, creating a twitter bot to communicate facts and updates about policies, etc.).

Contributing

Head over to our repository in github to learn how you can contribute.

MozSprint

Join us at the Mozilla Global Sprint June 1-2, 2017! We’ll be gathering in-person at sites around the world and online to collaborate on this project and learn from each other. Get your #mozsprint tickets now!