Privacy Policies in Medium-Sized European Town Administrations: A Comparative Analysis of English and German-Speaking Countries

Hosseini, Henry

Zusammenfassung

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has been in force since May 2018. Organizations and individuals must comply with this legislation if they collect or process the personal information of residents of the European Union. Prior research has focused on the examination of the privacy policies of the most frequently visited websites or mobile applications with the highest number of installations. The present study assesses the privacy policies of a less explored field: medium-sized town administrations. For this purpose, we analyzed and evaluated 644 privacy policies collected in Austria, Germany, and Ireland, focusing on their coverage of different data practice categories and GDPR-related dictionary phrases. We employed semi-automated data collection methods, deep learning and NLP techniques, and manual labor to perform this analysis. Our findings provide insight into the privacy policy landscape of medium-sized town administrations, where Austria and Germany exhibit a higher average coverage of GDPR data practice categories than Ireland.