Our team has worked to deliver a new update to PrivacyCheck, a data mining tool developed by the UT Center for Identity that analyzes the text of privacy policies and provides digestible summaries on information collected and stored. PrivacyCheck provides consumers with an overview of the ways in which companies use their personal data in a graphical, ‘at-a-glance’ format. Our team aimed to provide support for additional browsers with significant market share besides Chrome including Firefox, Edge, Opera, and Safari. We have also implemented an opt-out by default Background Monitoring tool. This allows PrivacyCheck to take a more active role in monitoring user activity and providing notifications as well as action items to protect privacy when interacting with websites that resell or fail to protect user data. Finally, we have developed an experimental feature that allows users to find privacy policies for connected IoT devices including printers and audio devices connected via Bluetooth, empowering users to protect privacy outside of their own web activity.

Team Members

Brian Kim
Jenna Kim
Samir Mohsin
Tiffany Nguyen
Sonia Shrotriya
Matthew Vu