Dagstuhl-Seminar — Grand Challenges for Research on Privacy Documents

Dagstuhl Seminar will gather an interdisciplinary group of researchers from privacy, natural language processing, human-computer interaction, public policy, and law to identify and characterize key challenges to research on privacy documents: privacy policies, terms of use, cookie policies, and other texts about data practices. In the status quo, privacy documents fail to fulfill the needs of stakeholders in our information society. Although many Internet users have concerns about their privacy, most lack the time, knowledge, and other resources to understand these documents, leaving them underinformed and compromising notice and choice. The needs of other stakeholders, including researchers, policymakers, and privacy practitioners, are similarly stymied. Although a growing body of research is devoted to analyzing, reconstituting, or otherwise using these documents to satisfy stakeholders’ needs, broader interdisciplinary efforts are needed. This seminar will identify and characterize key challenges in privacy document research and produce a roadmap of how to tackle them in order to move the field forward.