Differentiation

PrivaSearch is not alone in this sphere of online security through the parsing of online privacy policies. In fact, the product that I am pitching PrivaSearch is very similar in design, but differs in scope to PrivacyCheck. PrivaSearch does work the same way in that it is an extension added to the Chrome browser that when opened on a privacy policy webpage it sends the page's URL to a machine learning classification model to answer ten questions; however, PrivaSearch's questions are more educational in their scope than PrivacyCheck. Just to clarify, below I compare the two groups of questions that PrivacyCheck runs its database scan against to those Educational Assessment questions that PrivaSearch uses. The first group that PrivacyCheck call "User Control" are the ones that PrivacyCheck's team came up with, and launched with their beta version (Zaeem et al., 2018). The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) questions were released with PrivacyCheck v2 (Zaeem et al., 2020) . The GDPR is a data protection and privacy agency in the European Union and the European Economic Area that addresses the transfer of personal data outside the EU and EEA areas (Regulation, 2018) .

PrivacyCheck User Control Questions

  1. How well does this website protect your email address?

  2. How well does this website protect your credit card information and address?

  3. How well does this website handle your social security number?

  4. Does this website use or share your PII for marketing purposes?

  5. Does this website track or share your location?

  6. Does this website collect PII from children under 13?

  7. Does this website share your information with law enforcement?

  8. Does this website notify or allow you to opt-out after changing their privacy policy?

  9. Does this website allow you to edit or delete your information from its records?

  10. Does this website collect or share aggregated data related to your identity or behavior?

PrivacyCheck GDPR Questions

  1. Does this website share the user’s information with other websites only upon user consent?

  2. Does this website disclose where the company is based/user’s PII will be processed & transferred?

  3. Does this website support the right to be forgotten?

  4. If they retain PII for legal purposes after the user’s request to be forgotten, will they inform the user?

  5. Does this website allow the user the ability to reject usage of user’s PII?

  6. Does this website restrict the use of PII of children under the age of 16?

  7. Does this website advise the user that their data is encrypted even while at rest?

  8. Does this website ask for the user’s informed consent to perform data processing?

  9. Does this website implement all of the principles of data protection by design and by default?

  10. Does this website notify the user of security breaches without undue delay?

PrivaSearch Education Assessment Questions

  1. Does the product collect Personally Identifiable Information (PII)?

  2. Does the vendor commit not to further share student information other than as needed to provide the educational product or service? (Such as third party cloud storage, or a subcontractor the vendor works with under contract.)

  3. Does the vendor create a profile of students, other than for the educational purposes specified?

  4. . When you cancel the account or delete the app, will the vendor delete all the student data that has been provided or created?

  5. Does the product show [targeted] advertisements to student users?

  6. Does the vendor allow parents to access data it holds about students or enable schools to access data so the school can provide the data to parents in compliance with FERPA [Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act; USA]?

  7. Does the vendor promise that it pro- vides appropriate security for the data it collects?

  8. Does the vendor claim that it can change its privacy policy without notice at any time?

  9. Does the vendor say that if the company is sold, all bets are off?

  10. Do reviews or articles about the product or vendor raise any red flags that cause you concern?

(Gallagher et al., p. 9, 2020)

The breadth of the questions are similar; however, there is an important demarcation with whom PrivaSearch's questions are focused that teachers, and school boards will value: the students. This is an important differentiation in that educators and school boards want to ensure that students are at the forefront of these questions. Furthermore, these questions were created by Future of Privacy Forum, a non-profit organization whose main purpose is to bring all tech stakeholders together to come up with an agreement of how to responsibly use the data collected (Gallagher et al., 2020).