DiffAudit: Auditing Privacy Practices of Online Services for Children and Adolescents

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Figueira, Olivia, Trimananda, Rahmadi, Markopoulou, Athina, Jordan, Scott
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
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author Figueira, Olivia
Trimananda, Rahmadi
Markopoulou, Athina
Jordan, Scott
author_facet Figueira, Olivia
Trimananda, Rahmadi
Markopoulou, Athina
Jordan, Scott
contents Children's and adolescents' online data privacy are regulated by laws such as the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). Online services that are directed towards general audiences (i.e., including children, adolescents, and adults) must comply with these laws. In this paper, first, we present DiffAudit, a platform-agnostic privacy auditing methodology for general audience services. DiffAudit performs differential analysis of network traffic data flows to compare data processing practices (i) between child, adolescent, and adult users and (ii) before and after consent is given and user age is disclosed. We also present a data type classification method that utilizes GPT-4 and our data type ontology based on COPPA and CCPA, allowing us to identify considerably more data types than prior work. Second, we apply DiffAudit to a set of popular general audience mobile and web services and observe a rich set of behaviors extracted from over 440K outgoing requests, containing 3,968 unique data types we extracted and classified. We reveal problematic data processing practices prior to consent and age disclosure, lack of differentiation between age-specific data flows, inconsistent privacy policy disclosures, and sharing of linkable data with third parties, including advertising and tracking services.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2406_06473
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle DiffAudit: Auditing Privacy Practices of Online Services for Children and Adolescents
Figueira, Olivia
Trimananda, Rahmadi
Markopoulou, Athina
Jordan, Scott
Cryptography and Security
Children's and adolescents' online data privacy are regulated by laws such as the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). Online services that are directed towards general audiences (i.e., including children, adolescents, and adults) must comply with these laws. In this paper, first, we present DiffAudit, a platform-agnostic privacy auditing methodology for general audience services. DiffAudit performs differential analysis of network traffic data flows to compare data processing practices (i) between child, adolescent, and adult users and (ii) before and after consent is given and user age is disclosed. We also present a data type classification method that utilizes GPT-4 and our data type ontology based on COPPA and CCPA, allowing us to identify considerably more data types than prior work. Second, we apply DiffAudit to a set of popular general audience mobile and web services and observe a rich set of behaviors extracted from over 440K outgoing requests, containing 3,968 unique data types we extracted and classified. We reveal problematic data processing practices prior to consent and age disclosure, lack of differentiation between age-specific data flows, inconsistent privacy policy disclosures, and sharing of linkable data with third parties, including advertising and tracking services.
title DiffAudit: Auditing Privacy Practices of Online Services for Children and Adolescents
topic Cryptography and Security
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.06473