The Privacy Policy Landscape After the GDPR

The EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is one of the most demanding and comprehensive privacy regulations of all time. A year after it went into effect, we study its impact on the landscape of privacy policies online. We conduct the first longitudinal, in-depth, and at-scale assessment of privacy policies before and after the GDPR. We gauge the complete consumption cycle of these policies, from the first user impressions until the compliance assessment. We create a diverse corpus of two sets of 6,278 unique English-language privacy policies from inside and outside the EU, covering their pre-GDPR and the post-GDPR versions. The results of our tests and analyses suggest that the GDPR has been a catalyst for a major overhaul of the privacy policies inside and outside the EU. This overhaul of the policies, manifesting in extensive textual changes, especially for the EU-based websites, comes at mixed benefits to the users.