Privacy Policy Analyzer

About

Privacy Policy Analyzer is a user-centric browser extension designed to help individuals understand website privacy policies quickly, clearly, and accurately. Many online privacy policies are lengthy, difficult to read, and filled with complex legal language. This extension enables users to paste a privacy policy and instantly receive a structured, simplified summary that translates legal text into practical, understandable insights.

This tool is designed with usability, transparency, and privacy protection in mind. Its purpose is to help users make informed decisions about how websites handle their personal data—without requiring them to read thousands of words or interpret dense legal terminology. Privacy Policy Analyzer clarifies what data is collected, who it is shared with, how long it is retained, and whether the practices described in the selected text pose a low, medium, or high privacy risk.

WHAT THE EXTENSION DOES

When a user paste a text on a webpage containing a privacy policy, the extension processes only that selection and generates a concise summary organized into four key areas:

Data Collection
Identifies the categories of personal data described in the selected text, such as identifiers, contact information, device data, tracking technologies, or sensitive information.

Data Sharing
Describes whether the highlighted section indicates sharing with third parties, including affiliates, service providers, advertisers, analytics companies, or law enforcement.

Data Retention
Summarizes any explicit statements about how long data is kept. If no timeframe is mentioned, the summary clearly reflects this to maintain accuracy.

Overall Privacy Risk
Provides a simple low, medium, or high risk rating based on the selected section of the policy.

The extension analyzes only the specific text the user highlights. It does not process entire webpages automatically.

WHY THIS EXTENSION IS USEFUL

Privacy policies often exceed several thousand words and contain dense legal terminology. Most users do not read them, even though they routinely accept them. As a result, people consent to data practices they might not fully understand.

Privacy Policy Analyzer helps solve this problem by:

Reducing the time required to understand key privacy concepts
Highlighting important details users may overlook
Making privacy risk visible and easy to interpret
Supporting informed decision-making
Improving transparency around data practices
This extension is useful for students, researchers, privacy-conscious individuals, and anyone who wants a clearer understanding of how websites handle personal data.

PRIVACY AND SECURITY

Privacy Policy Analyzer follows strict privacy-by-design principles.
The extension does not collect, store, or transmit any personal information about the user.

What the extension does not do:

It does not access browsing history
It does not access cookies or site data
It does not collect unique identifiers
It does not track user behavior
It does not run in the background
It does not store any information about user interactions

What the extension accesses:
Only the text that the user manually highlights or copied to the text box in plugin
Only when the user triggers the summarization request
All processing is stateless. The backend receives only the selected text, without metadata, identifiers, or session information. No text or summaries are stored.

HOW IT WORKS

The user highlights any text on a webpage.
The extension extracts only that selected text.
The text is securely sent to a summarization API.
The API returns a structured summary.
The summary is displayed in the extension’s popup interface.
All actions are user-initiated, and the extension performs no automatic data collection.

KEY FEATURES

Instant summaries of highlighted privacy policy text
Structured outputs: data collection, data sharing, data retention, privacy risk
Easy-to-read severity levels (low, medium, high)
Simple and intuitive interface
Fast and accurate summarization
No tracking, no cookies, no personal data collection
Lightweight and easy to use
Works on any website containing text

USABILITY AND RESEARCH CONTEXT

This extension is part of an academic project evaluating whether AI-assisted privacy summaries improve user comprehension. It is designed to support:

Greater understanding of privacy policies
Reduced cognitive effort
Informed consent
Better decision-making during browsing
The tool is not intended to replace legal privacy notices but to enhance user understanding of selected text.

PERMISSIONS REQUIRED

The extension uses only minimal permissions:

activeTab: Required to read the text that the user highlights
contextMenus: Allows the right-click “Summarize selected text” option
scripting: Injects the content script when the user interacts with the extension
No host permissions beyond the active tab are used.

WHAT THIS EXTENSION IS NOT

It is not a legal interpretation tool
It is not a compliance audit system
It does not automatically analyze entire websites
It does not detect security vulnerabilities
It does not evaluate undisclosed or deleted content
It simply summarizes the text that the user selects.

Developed By

Patrick Abu
Nisal Padukka