Automated Privacy Notice Compliance Screening via DOM Analysis
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Solution Overview
Problem
Website and application providers face challenges in determining whether their user interfaces correctly display necessary privacy notices and controls, making it difficult to ensure compliance with regulatory requirements and user privacy expectations.
Innovation Solution
A system that automatically screens websites by analyzing their Document Object Model (DOM) representation to determine the presence and visibility of informational notices, using keywords, language detection, and visibility metrics, and provides notifications for rectification if necessary.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Measurement precision
If automated screening is implemented to detect privacy notices, then compliance accuracy is improved, but system complexity increases
Solution Approach 1:
The automated screening system is divided into distinct modules: a DOM retrieval module that obtains the page structure, a traversal module that searches for keywords and phrases, a visibility assessment module that evaluates notice prominence, and a reporting module that generates compliance indicators. Each module handles a specific aspect of the screening process, improving overall accuracy while managing complexity through functional separation.
Solution Approach 2:
The system uses the Document Object Model (DOM) as an intermediary representation of the web page. Instead of directly analyzing the complex HTML structure, the system retrieves and processes the DOM representation, which provides a standardized, traversable hierarchy of page elements. This intermediary layer simplifies the detection process while maintaining comprehensive coverage of privacy notices.
2Reliability
If comprehensive keyword analysis is performed to detect informational notices, then detection reliability is improved, but processing time increases
Solution Approach 1:
The system performs preliminary actions by first retrieving the DOM representation and identifying potential notice elements before conducting detailed keyword analysis. The traversal process pre-screens content elements based on their structural properties and text content, filtering out elements that clearly do not match privacy notice patterns before applying more intensive analysis. This preliminary filtering reduces overall processing time while maintaining detection reliability.
3Measurement precision
If visibility metrics are calculated based on multiple DOM parameters, then assessment accuracy is improved, but computational requirements increase
Solution Approach 1:
The visibility assessment applies different evaluation criteria to different aspects of the notice element. Instead of uniformly analyzing all properties of every element, the system focuses on locally relevant properties: pixel size for prominence assessment, positioning relative to screen edges for visibility determination, and font size for readability evaluation. This localized approach improves assessment accuracy for each specific attribute while reducing overall computational requirements by avoiding unnecessary analysis of irrelevant properties.
Data Source
AI summary
To determine whether a web resource complies with a policy for displaying an informational notice, a system obtaining a Document Object Model (DOM) representation of the web resource, the DOM representation specifying a hierarchy of pages and including instructions for displaying content elements. The system traverses the DOM representation of the web resource to determine whether the web resource includes the informational notice, including calculating a likelihood that a content element corresponds to the informational notice based on one or more keywords associated with the informational notice. In response to determining that the content element corresponds to the informational notice, the system determines a set of visual parameters of the content element, and determines whether the web resource is configured to display the content element according to a visibility metric. The system further generates an indication of whether the web resource contains the informational notice according to the visibility metric.