Software End User License Agreements (EULAs) are notoriously dense legal documents that users often skim over without fully understanding their implications, including privacy-related clauses. This research proposes a novel approach to improve the readability and privacy awareness of EULAs by implementing a nudge tool to improve user attention and comprehension of EULA contents. Through natural language processing techniques, privacy-sensitive keywords within EULAs are identified and visually emphasized for users. By drawing attention to EULA clauses related to data collection, sharing, and security, users can make more informed decisions about their privacy when agreeing to software terms. Detailed user experiments involving 173 participants are performed to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed approach demonstrating significant improvements in comprehension and awareness of privacy implications compared to traditional EULAs. The developed nudge tool has been released and made freely available to interested readers.
Download the plugin: EULA Analyzer by Data and Design Lab