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Description from extension meta
PrivacyCheck is a data mining tool that analyzes the text of privacy policies.
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Description from store
PrivacyCheck automatically summarizes online privacy policies and provides consumers an overview of the ways in which companies use their personal data in a graphical, ‘at-a-glance’ format.
The new and improved version 2 provides faster results, an assessment of the privacy policy with respect to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), new interface, top 3 competitors with better privacy policies in the same market sector, and many more!
A U.S. Department of Justice report issued July 2014 estimated that roughly 7% American households reported some type of identity theft in the previous year. What do consumers need to know in order to protect themselves and their families from identity theft? Information is key. The more we know about how companies use our personal information, the better prepared we are when deciding whether or not to divulge it. PrivacyCheck is a valuable resource that consumers can use to get an overview of the essential attributes of a company’s online privacy policy in way that is quick and easy to understand.
Federal and state laws require businesses to publicly post a privacy policy stating how they use customers’ Personally Identifiable Information (PII). Additionally, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has successfully prosecuted companies for deceptive and misleading practices when using consumers’ data in ways contrary to what is stated in their privacy policy. As a result, most companies’ privacy policies are easily accessible online. The problem is that many people do not have time to read these lengthy and sometimes technical documents.
PrivacyCheck is a browser add-on intended to provide consumers an overview of the ways in which companies use their personal data in a graphical, ‘at-a-glance’ format. Similar, currently available resources fall short of this goal due to their lack of comprehensive web coverage. For example, TRUSTe and P3P are sign-up services that require a business to enroll in order to participate, and multiple crowd-sourced efforts only provide information for websites that have been manually checked.
PrivacyCheck surpasses existing add-ons, apps, and certifications by using a Data Mining algorithm to access the text of any webpage. The user provides the URL for the company’s privacy policy and PrivacyCheck searches the page, returning icons that indicate the level of risk for several types of PII.
Copyright © 2020 The University of Texas at Austin, Center for Identity, All Rights Reserved.
Contact: Razieh Nokhbeh Zaeem, [email protected].
Latest reviews
- (2023-04-08) Dan Ross: Just installed, doesn't work at all. Can't read policies on big name sites like Whatsapp, Signal, Facebook or apparently any other site. Uninstalling it.
- (2023-02-08) Benny Rowe: Only one star because it's stopped functioning... It was good while it worked, but is apparently unsupported, and has stopped working. I tried reinstalling, but to no avail - when I try to run it, I get this message: "PrivacyCheck™ ran into a problem fetching data from the database or scraping the privacy policy from the website. Some websites include certain HTML features that makes it difficult to extract data. The PrivacyCheck™ team is working to improve this functionality. We apologize for the inconvenience." Apparently they've stopped updating... it happens. Too bad, because when it worked, it was quite useful.
- (2018-12-13) E Dickens: It does take a while and I wish it would run in the background when you navigate away from the privacy policy page. It stops running even when you switch tabs. Otherwise, I like it.
- (2018-11-19) Mark Housley: This is an interesting extension. It does take a while and I wish it would run in the background when you navigate away from the privacy policy page. It stops running even when you switch tabs. Otherwise, I like it.
- (2016-04-18) Mike W: Fills a real need. Actually reading privacy policies isn't realistic, but just blindly trusting them isn't good idea either, so it's nice to have software figure it out for you automatically.
- (2015-05-12) A Pantheon: Works as intended. I don't know how others can't get this to work. It's even self explanatory!!!
- (2015-05-07) AN Pruntel: Can't get this to work. Downloaded the add-on to Chrome, navigate to privacy policy on my website, click start and get message from PrivacyCheck that "this is not a privacy policy." However, it is a page clearly labeled "Privacy Policy." Maybe it only works for shopping sites?
Statistics
Installs
1,014
history
Category
Rating
3.9333 (15 votes)
Last update / version
2021-05-17 / 3.0.1
Listing languages
en-US