Collection, Use and Sharing of Personal Information

A lot of recent work in the domain of privacy policy regulation has been around the choice of opting-in versus opting-out, a few others focus on the readability and length of the privacy policy, and some others have focused efforts to analyze network traffic. However, very few of the recent works in this field have examined the content of privacy policies. This work analyzes the content of privacy policies of mobile apps, application suites, social networks and ISPs. For each of the privacy policies examined in this study, this report outlines the choices that are offered to users over collection, use and sharing of personal, behavioral and non-personal information. This study sheds light on both direct and indirect sources of user data collection, and finally compares the privacy practices of the companies considered in this study, both within each category and between different categories