Most access-to-justice technologies are designed by lawyers and reflect lawyers' perspectives on what people need. Most of these technologies do not fulfill their promise because the people they are designed to serve do not use them. Participatory design, which was developed in Scandinavia as a process for creating better software, brings end users and other stakeholders into the design process to help decide what problems need to be solved and how. Work at the Stanford Legal Design Lab highlights new insights about what tools can provide the assistance that people actually need, and about where and how they are likely to access and use those tools. These participatory design models lead to more effective innovation and greater community engagement with courts and the legal system.
Website privacy policies sometimes provide users the option to opt-out of certain collections and uses of their personal data. Unfortunately, many privacy policies bury these instructions deep in their text, and few web users have the time or skill necessary to discover them. We describe a method for the automated detection of opt-out choices in privacy policy text and their presentation to users through a web browser extension. We describe the creation of two corpora of opt-out choices, which enable the training of classifiers to identify opt-outs in privacy policies. Our overall approach for extracting and classifying opt-out choices combines heuristics to identify commonly found opt-out hyperlinks with supervised machine learning to automatically identify less conspicuous instances. Our approach achieves a precision of 0.93 and a recall of 0.9. We introduce Opt-Out Easy, a web browser extension designed to present available opt-out choices to users as they browse the web. We evaluate the usability of our browser extension with a user study. We also present results of a large-scale analysis of opt-outs found in the text of thousands of the most popular websites.
CCS CONCEPTS• Security and Privacy → Human and societal aspects of security and privacy.
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