Big Tech was trying to evade EU data privacy law, but couldn't hide from AI

Some of the world’s largest technology companies might be breaking the European Union’s new data privacy law, according to an analysis of their policies conducted by artificial intelligence software.

Researchers from the European Union Institute in Florence worked with the EU’s consumer organization to create the software. They then used the software to examine the privacy policies of 14 major technology businesses, including by Alphabet Inc., Amazon.com Inc., and Facebook Inc.

They found that a third of those clauses were "potentially problematic" or contained "insufficient information." Another 11 per cent of the policy’s sentences used unclear language, the academics said.

The researchers didn’t make public which companies’ policies violated which provisions of the law, publishing only aggregate findings for all of the companies in the study.

Clear and comprehensive explanations of what data a company collects, how it uses the data, and who it shares the information with, are key requirements of Europe’s new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), a sweeping privacy law that took effect on May 25. In many cases, companies must get explicit consent from customers to hold and process their data. Companies that violate the new rule can face fines as high as four per cent of global sales.