Automatic Detection of Vague Words and Sentences in Privacy Policies

Website privacy policies represent the single most important source of information for users to gauge how their personal data are collected, used and shared by companies. However, privacy policies are often vague and people struggle to understand the content. Their opaqueness poses a significant challenge to both users and policy regulators. In this paper, we seek to identify vague content in privacy policies. We construct the first corpus of human-annotated vague words and sentences and present empirical studies on automatic vagueness detection. In particular, we investigate context-aware and context-agnostic models for predicting vague words, and explore auxiliary-classifier generative adversarial networks for characterizing sentence vagueness. Our experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of proposed approaches. Finally, we provide suggestions for resolving vagueness and improving the usability of privacy policies.Comment: 10 page

The teleological account of proportional surveillance

This article analyses proportionality as a potential element of a theory of morally justified surveillance, and sets out a teleological account. It draws on conceptions in criminal justice ethics and just war theory, defines teleological proportionality in the context of surveillance, and sketches some of the central values likely to go into the consideration. It then explores some of the ways in which deontologists might want to modify the account and illustrates the difficulties of doing so. Having set out the account, however, it considers whether the proportionality condition is necessary to a theory of morally justified surveillance. The article concludes that we need and should apply only a necessity condition, but notes that proportionality considerations may retain some use in in practice, as a form of coarse‐grained filter applied before assessing necessity when deliberating the permissibility of potential forms of surveillance

Evaluating e-commerce trust using fuzzy logic [article]

Trust is widely recognized as an essential factor for the continual development of business to customer electronic commerce (B2C EC). Many trust models have been developed, however, most are subjective and do not take into account the vagueness and ambiguity of EC trust and the customers’ intuitions and experience when conducting online transactions. In this article, we develop a fuzzy trust model using fuzzy reasoning to evaluate EC trust. This trust model is based on the information customers expect to find on an EC Website and is shown to increase customers trust towards online merchants. We argue that fuzzy logic is suitable for trust evaluation as it takes into account the uncertainties within e-commerce data and like human relationships; it is often expressed by linguistics terms rather then numerical values. The evaluation of the proposed model will be illustrated using two case studies and a comparison with two evaluation models was conducted to emphasise the importance of usin fuzzy logic

Against Imperialism in Legal Concepts

The authority of government—and that of its politicians, judges, regulators, and other specific authorities—continues to grow more imperialistic. This is partly due to the imperialism of legal concepts as facilitated by Wittgenstein’s famously non-essentialist treatment of concepts through family resemblance theory. Although non-essentialism or anti-essentialism can be highly valuable in forming religious and literary concepts, and in describing the sometimes incoherent everyday usage of concepts and terms, all legal concepts should be scientific-style essentialist concepts. Such essentialism combats the broad discretion granted and obscured by non-essentialist approaches that allow concepts to absorb contradictory elements and harmfully hold them together, thus allowing legal authorities to choose from among only those elements that suit their purposes in any given case. Instead of arguing for the total exclusion of family resemblance and similar theories from use in legal concepts, I argue for translating non-essentialist concepts into essentialist ones while still using the former’s theory forms. Precise essentialist concepts, with core and non-contradictory properties clearly delineated, are necessary for maximizing the rational and moral legitimacy of law, which coercively regulates the behavior of ordinary citizens at the command of political and legal authorities. Legal rules and commands must be as clear and consistent as reasonably possible not only for optimal rationality and morality, but also for legitimacy in the eyes of those subject to law. This is especially important in an increasingly diverse society of incompatible perspectives and decreasing conscious and unconscious adherence to the Anglo-American legal tradition

Academics and Social Networking Sites: Benefits, Problems and Tensions in Professional Engagement with Online Networking

The web has had a profound effect on the ways people interact, with online social networks arguably playing an important role in changing or augmenting how we connect with others. However, uptake of online social networking by the academic community varies, and needs to be understood. This paper presents an independent, novel analysis of a large-scale dataset published by Nature Publishing Group detailing the results of a survey about academics use of online social networking services. An open coding approach was used to analyse 480 previously unused text responses. The analysis revealed a wide range of benefits and also problems associated with engaging with online networking, and tensions within this. The analysis provides further insight into the nuances of uptake, by exploring clusters of co-reported benefits and problems within the qualitative analysis. The findings will help move forward current debates surrounding social media use by academics from being viewed in solely beneficial terms, towards an understanding of the problems and tensions that arise through academic work online