Published September 1, 2025
| Version v1
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Layered, Overlapping, and Inconsistent: A Large-Scale Analysis of the Multiple Privacy Policies and Controls of U.S. Banks
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Description
This zip provides the main artifacts for our study: a web crawler ('crawler_and_data/crawler'), the resulting collection of crawled documents ('document_collection'), and manually annotated data ('data_files/quotations.csv') used for analysis. All data files are provided to reproduce the main results in the paper "Layered, Overlapping, and Inconsistent: A Large-Scale Analysis of the Multiple Privacy Policies and Controls of U.S. Banks".
The research questions are
- RQ1: How many privacy policies are consumers likely to encounter for a given U.S. bank? What do their length and readability reveal about the effort required for consumers to understand a bank’s data practices?
- RQ2: What do a bank's multiple privacy policies, provided in response to different regulations, disclose about third-party sharing practices regarding marketing and advertising purposes? Are these disclosures consistent across multiple policies provided by the \textit{same} bank?
- RQ3: How many privacy opt-outs do banks provide regarding third-party sharing for marketing purposes, as required by different regulations?
- (a) a crawler that enables crawling for potential privacy policy documents from the landing page of a website, up to 2 layers deep (see more in the `Privacy Policy Retrieval' paragraph of Section 4.1.1 in the paper);
- (b) a collection of five types of privacy documents that the top ~2000 U.S. banks provide (see more in the `Policy classification' paragraph of Section 4.1.1 in the paper); and
- (c) annotated privacy policy documents according to codebook (see Appendix D in the paper), where data-sharing disclosures and opt-out choices are provided in quotations (see more in Section 4.2.4 in the paper).
Additionally, we provide code and supplementary data files to reproduce the main results that answer the three research questions: Tables 1-5 and Figure 4.
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data_artifact.zip
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(439.6 MB)
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