Privacy Washing: Detecting Internal Contradictions in Privacy Policies
Privacy policies may contain internal contradictions in which commitments are undermined by practices documented elsewhere in the same policy. We operationalize this phenomenon, privacy washing, through a four-stage pipeline: statement extraction, compatibility filtering and natural language inference screening, multi-model judge verification, and thematic analysis, with contradictions confirmed by majority vote of a three-model LLM panel. Applied to two corpora of website privacy policies, 123 collected in 2026 (OPPT) and 115 collected in 2015 (OPP-115), the pipeline finds the same category patterns recurring across the 11-year gap, with third-party sharing contradictions the majority of...
| Authors | Thomas Brackin |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CY |
| Published | 2 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 2 September 2026 |
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