AI software research shows 'tech giants' may be violating GDPR

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An artificial intelligence software’s analysis revealed that tech giants may be breaking the new European law, General Data Protection Regulation.

The European Union implemented GDPR after the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica incident. The law required companies to be transparent about the data they collect from the users and who they share it with.

Claudette, an AI project to analyse consumer contracts and privacy policies, is designed by the law department of the European University Institute.

Claudette analysed the privacy policies of Google, Facebook, Instagram, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, WhatsApp, Twitter, Uber, AirBnB, Booking.com, Skyscanner and Netflix.

Privacy policies are heavily worded and have a large data set, which is why the European Consumer Organization, BEUC teamed up with Claudette.

“Our study indicates that none of the analysed privacy policies meets the requirements of the GDPR. The evaluated corpus, comprising 3658 sentences (80.398 words) contains 401 sentences (11.0%) which we marked as containing unclear language, and 1240 sentences (33.9%) that we marked as potentially unlawful clause, i.e. either a "problematic processing” clause, or an “insufficient information” clause (under articles 13 and 14 of the GDPR),” the study said.

One-third of the privacy policies contained unlawful languages, according to the research. However, the researchers didn’t reveal which companies were in violation of the law; only an aggregate of the data was released.

Recently, a Norwegian Consumer Council report has accused Google, Facebook and Microsoft of using dark patterns to nudge users to select privacy intrusive option.