$1.2M NSF grant will help multidisciplinary team create resource for privacy documentation | University of Michigan News
A $1.2 million grant in NSF’s Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace program, funded in part to a University of Michigan School of Information research team, will go toward building a search engine and other tools to help collect and classify billions of privacy documents on the web.
The overall goal of the work led by Penn State researchers is to make the web safer for users by helping scientists study the data practices of online services and what they disclose in privacy policies and other documents.
The team that also includes a member of the Future of Privacy Forum will develop large-scale techniques for interpretation of materials, create tools for research and practical use, and develop mechanisms for crawling the web to locate and index the documents. The forum is an education and advocacy group based in Washington, D.C.
“This multidisciplinary project will dramatically improve researchers’, practitioners’, and policymakers’ capabilities for analyzing and understanding the state of digital privacy, including the effects of regulation,” said Florian Schaub, assistant professor at the School of Information and principal investigator of the University of Michigan team. “The goal is to create an infrastructure and tools that researchers can readily use rather than having to build up their own data collection and analysis pipelines from scratch, as is currently the status quo.”
