Evolution of legal statements on the web

Abstract

In this paper we propose to study the evolution of legal statements that can be found in web sites. Legal statements are an important part of each web site because they can be seen as a contract between the owner of the site and its users. For example, a site's privacy policy explains what kind of data is collected from users by the operator and how it is processed. Operators use terms of use to put restrictions on the conduct of users. In this paper we describe our proposal for a research agenda and methodology that analyzes the evolution of legal statements on the web. The research agenda argues that studying the content of legal statements and how they change over time allows to analyze and understand the evolution of the web from different viewpoints. Specifically, changing legal statements allow to identify emerging legal developments, to expose shifting business objectives, and to track the balance of power between operators and users.Our suggested methodology proposes to obtain historical snapshots of web sites available in the Internet Archive, to group them into different classes, and to analyze the content of the legal document as well as to compute metrics such as size and readability scores. The obtained data can then be used to formulate hypotheses about the evolution of certain characteristics of the web. We discuss a pilot study that instantiates our methodology. This study is based on five snapshots of 15 different web sites, and it shows that the methodology is feasible and can generate meaningful results.

Legal aspects of web systems

“…Readability and understandability of the terms is a concern because they (potentially) constitute a contract between the operator and users, and because users have a broad spectrum of educational backgrounds [30] [28]. One study found that these terms have become successively more elaborate between 1998 and 2006 [31].…”

“…For instance, Kienle and Vasiliu have studied the evolution of legal statements on 15 web sites with five "snapshots" between 1998 and 2006 [31]. Making these legal statements available publicly would require to ask permissions from 15 different right-holders.…”

Readability and the Web

“…While the readability indices we recalled in Section 2 were originally developed for text documents, they are nowadays applied to web documents, too. Typical applications in this context are to assess how comprehensible legal statements are [1] or to let users select documents most appropriate to their educational level. The latter application can be subdivided further into ranking web search results according to their readability [2] or to filter documents that do not comply with the reading ability of a given user [3,4].…”

“…Naturally, producers as well as consumers of online texts are interested in the readability of online documents. This has led to the application of readability formulae to HTML documents [1]. The typical approach here was to simply take a full HTML document, strip off all the markup and parse the remainder of the document through a readability formula.…”

“…Here, the notion of the readability of a document can serve several purposes. Readability metrics have been employed to assess the usability of web sites [1], as a static quality metric for ranking web search results [2] or to filter documents which match a user's reading ability [3][4][5][6].…”