policyInterpreter

Inspiration

A lot of users do not take the time to read the terms of service or privacy policies of the applications they use, leaving them vulnerable to leaks of their private data. One article by The New York Times where they read 150 privacy policies suggest that it takes an average of 18 minutes to read a privacy policy and that most policies can only be understood at a college or professional career reading level. This gap in knowledge leaves many consumers blind to what they are actually giving up when signing up for these services/applications. In comes our application! Policy Interpreter is an application that scans user agreements and privacy policies and points out any concerning language or points to the user in a simple and clear way.

What it does

Policy Interpreter is an android application that uses regex to extract key concerning words in privacy policies like "collect" or "disclose" in privacy policies and points out these extracted sentences to the user, as well as providing context for what it means for a company to collect this type of information on its users or disclose that information to third parties. We believe this application can be of great use to the general population of internet users as many do not read the fine print of these policies, thus exposing them to exploitation by any service they may come across. This application will make everyone a safer citizen of the internet and better equipped to deal with potential cyber security issues.

How we built it

Policy Interpreter was created using Java and Android Studios.

Challenges we ran into

Our main challenge was trying to figure out the correct regular expressions to extract the sentences we wanted from the text. Since none of us have worked with regular expressions before it was definitely a learning curve.

Accomplishments that We're proud of

We are proud of the idea we have come up with as well as producing an application for android studios as some members have not had experience with android development.

What we learned

Our team was unfamiliar with Regular Expressions so learning the syntax and logic behind them was a great learning experience.

What's next for Policy Interpreter

Our next steps for the application would be: Implementing the full application and having it be triggered upon clicking a user agreement on other applications. To improve the scanning capabilities we will be looking into natural language models.