Priva: TL;DR for Reading Privacy Policies

A Chrome extension that truncates privacy policies into readable summaries with GPT-3.

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See the video above for a detailed explanation of Priva and a live demonstration!

Inspiration

Privacy policies are often long, difficult to parse, and jargon-heavy, leading many people to accept them without knowing what's being done with their personal information. A Deloitte survey of 2,000 U.S. consumers in 2017 found that 91% of people consent to terms of service without reading them. Our extension summarizes privacy policies with the click of a button, aiming to inform people how online companies collect, manage, and use their data.

Our process

First, we quickly learned how to create Chrome extensions. Then, we ideated ways to summarize and highlight the main points of lengthy privacy policies through GPT-3 prompts. We fetch the OpenAI DaVinci API, so our extension can summarize content from the user's chosen website.

Challenges

This was our first time using GPT-3. We originally wanted to feed the URL of the policy into the prompt, but we found out that GPT-3 can't access information from URLs and has a length limit. We ended up prompting based on the company name. Understanding how to pass information through a Chrome extension was tricky, too.

Future

As beginners, we were able to learn new knowledge about creating Chrome extensions and utilizing APIs to create a product that will help people better protect their privacy. We hope that this product will help more people understand what is being done with their personal data and increase transparency. This extension could expand to be not only for privacy policy pages, but also for terms and conditions, contracts, and other documents that are important but very difficult to parse. Priva is aimed for the purpose of understanding privacy policies in a short amount of time, but the possibilities of using this extension tool are endless.

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