Modularity is the Key A New Approach to Social Media Privacy Policies

Social media privacy policies are the legal documents which provide inside information about the collection, storage, and access to user data. These policies are often long and convoluted for an average internet user to comprehend. Agreeing to such policies without proper knowledge is dangerous for a user's online privacy and security, mirroring to offline impacts as well. Prior work has largely concentrated on improving the accessibility of these privacy policies, but does not address the need for the flexibility in the user's c hoice. Our study examines the existing social media privacy policies, especially that of Facebook and targets to map the policy statements to the distinct services offered. Our proposed Modularized Privacy Policy Model (MPPM) allows users to agree to specific services which they wish to use. Modularizing the privacy policies based on the services creates a service-policy map for developers which lets them easily tie in new features to the corresponding functionality of social media platforms.