Aiming to correct the privacy imbalance between consumers and businesses, a group of academics released a tool that uses automation and machine learning to mine privacy policies and deliver easy-to-use options for a consumer to limit a company’s use of data.
The browser plug-in, called Opt-Out Easy, is the brainchild of a group of researchers from Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Michigan, Stanford University, and Penn State University and represents the latest shift on the status quo in data collection. The groups have analyzed a large number of privacy policies with machine learning algorithms to identify the actionable choices users can take using those policies.
The goal of the tool is to allow consumers to easily apply their own privacy wishes to any website they visit, says Norman Sadeh, a CyLab researcher and professor in Carnegie Mellon’s School of Computer Science.
“Privacy…
