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From Regulation to Relevance: Integrating User Values into Privacy Policy Scoring

Authors:
Brian Kim
Suzanne Barber

Keywords: Privacy policy evaluation; User privacy values; Personalized scoring; Personally Identifiable Information.

Abstract:
Despite increasing regulatory efforts to protect user data, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), privacy policies—the main way users encounter these protections—remain difficult to understand and largely ineffective in guiding informed consent. Existing automated tools for evaluating these policies prioritize legal compliance but often overlook what users personally value in data privacy. This paper proposes a user-centered approach that integrates individual privacy values into policy scoring systems. A survey capturing user comfort levels with various types of personally identifiable information (PII) reveals wide variability in privacy concerns. These insights are embedded into the PrivacyCheck(TM) tool to enable personalized policy evaluations. The results show that incorporating user values can significantly shift policy scores, especially in areas related to user control, highlighting a gap between regulatory standards and real user priorities. This work moves toward privacy tools that better reflect what users actually care about, supporting more meaningful and transparent data governance.

Pages: 51 to 57

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2026

Publication date: March 8, 2026

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2308-4065

ISBN: 978-1-68558-351-4

Location: Valencia, Spain

Dates: from March 8, 2026 to March 12, 2026