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
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.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{gupta-etal-2024-creation,
title = "Creation and Analysis of an International Corpus of Privacy Laws",
author = "Gupta, Sonu and
Gopi, Geetika and
Balaji, Harish and
Poplavska, Ellen and
O{'}Toole, Nora and
Arora, Siddhant and
Norton, Thomas and
Sadeh, Norman and
Wilson, Shomir",
editor = "Calzolari, Nicoletta and
Kan, Min-Yen and
Hoste, Veronique and
Lenci, Alessandro and
Sakti, Sakriani and
Xue, Nianwen",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)",
month = may,
year = "2024",
address = "Torino, Italia",
publisher = "ELRA and ICCL",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.365/",
pages = "4092--4105"
}