Creation and Analysis of an International Corpus of Privacy Laws
Sonu Gupta, Geetika Gopi, Harish Balaji, Ellen Poplavska, Nora O’Toole, Siddhant Arora, Thomas Norton, Norman Sadeh, Shomir Wilson
Abstract
The landscape of privacy laws and regulations around the world is complex and ever-changing. National and super-national laws, agreements, decrees, and other government-issued rules form a patchwork that companies must follow to operate internationally. To examine the status and evolution of this patchwork, we introduce the Privacy Law Corpus, of 1,043 privacy laws, regulations, and guidelines, covering 183 jurisdictions. This corpus enables a large-scale quantitative and qualitative examination of legal focus on privacy. We examine the temporal distribution of when privacy laws were created and illustrate the dramatic increase in privacy legislation over the past 50 years, although a finer-grained examination reveals that the rate of increase varies depending on the personal data types that privacy laws address. Our exploration also demonstrates that most privacy laws respectively address relatively few personal data types. Additionally, topic modeling results show the prevalence of common themes in privacy laws, such as finance, healthcare, and telecommunications. Finally, we release the corpus to the research community to promote further study.- Anthology ID:
- 2024.lrec-main.365
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
- Month:
- May
- Year:
- 2024
- Address:
- Torino, Italia
- Editors:
- Nicoletta Calzolari, Min-Yen Kan, Veronique Hoste, Alessandro Lenci, Sakriani Sakti, Nianwen Xue
- Venues:
- LREC | COLING
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- ELRA and ICCL
- Note:
- Pages:
- 4092–4105
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.365
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Sonu Gupta, Geetika Gopi, Harish Balaji, Ellen Poplavska, Nora O’Toole, Siddhant Arora, Thomas Norton, Norman Sadeh, and Shomir Wilson. 2024. Creation and Analysis of an International Corpus of Privacy Laws. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 4092–4105, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
- Cite (Informal):
- Creation and Analysis of an International Corpus of Privacy Laws (Gupta et al., LREC-COLING 2024)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-5/2024.lrec-main.365.pdf