7. Use an LLM to help read privacy policies
There is a numbered list of online services below. Figure out which ones you have been assigned in the “7 services” column of the assignment spreadsheet (link removed). Pick one additional service or app that you use, that isn’t on the list.
Find the privacy policies for those three services and download them. Very likely there is not an obvious “download” button, so you might have to just navigate to the page describing the privacy policy and tell your browser to “print” the page (ctrl-P or ⌘-P), but then save it as a .pdf instead of actually printing onto paper. The policy may also be spread across multiple pages, so you may have to do this several times and gather several .pdfs. It might be helpful to paste them together into a single large .pdf.
Upload these files to a Large Language Model to have it help you understand and compare them. Make sure that the LLM is able to identify that these are the privacy policies of the three services you are looking at, and can tell which one is which.
What to ask it
Use the LLM to figure out various features of the privacy policies you hadn’t thought about before. Possible ideas of what to think about, but you should come up with others that are specific to your apps:
- What data of yours does the service acquire?
- What country is data stored in? Are there laws they comply with that might work differently from the laws you expect?
- What information about you do advertisers get access to?
- Do they sell your information to other services, or just “share it with partners”, and who are those “partners”?
- Maybe ask the LLM for suggestions about issues with the privacy policies you didn’t even think of.
- Think about whether there’s anything else you’re curious about, that you can use the LLM to help you find by understanding the meanings, which you couldn’t find just by doing ctrl-F.
- Compare and contrast the two services you were assigned, and the one you chose.
What to submit
Once you’re done, copy and paste the relevant sections of the conversation into a file to upload here. Ensure that you include the section where you verify that the LLM understood what it’s looking at. Make sure that the important and interesting claims it makes are supported by actual text from the policy, rather than hallucinations. That is, if it says “they don’t share your data with any partners”, it should find a quote from the privacy policy that specifically says this! Add your own summary of the important points at the top of the file.