SoK: From Generation to Consumption of Privacy Documents in Software Systems

Computer Science > Cryptography and Security [Submitted on 12 Aug 2026] SoK: From Generation to Consumption of Privacy Documents in Software Systems Shidong Pan, Clark LaChance, Zhen Tao, Sepideh Ghanavati Privacy documents (e.g., privacy policies) are a central mechanism through which digital services disclose data practices and seek user consent. Over the past decades, research on privacy documents has expanded significantly, encompassing not only traditional privacy policies but also short notices (e.g., privacy labels) and interface-level transparency mechanisms. As this research area continues to grow, it has become increasingly difficult to obtain a coherent view of how privacy documents are created, analyzed, evaluated, and maintained across their lifecycle. This SoK provides a unified, lifecycle-oriented view of privacy documents from a software engineering perspective. We systematically review and analyze 290 papers published between 2010 and 2025, organizing them around five research questions that examine how privacy documents are (1) defined and scoped, (2) generated, (3) analyzed and extracted, (4) checked for inconsistencies and noncompliance, and (5) evaluated and improved for usability. Building on our findings, we identify 15 key research trends and 21 open opportunities. We further chart four broader research directions that highlight (i) emerging challenges in AI-centric platforms, (ii) the need for diverse and up-to-date data foundations, (iii) LLM-based unified policy-code analysis, and (iv) dual usability for end-users and developers. We hope this SoK provides a shared foundation for future research on privacy policies and privacy documents. Comments: This SoK paper has been accepted by NDSS 2027 Subjects: Cryptography and Security (cs.CR); Computation and Language (cs.CL) Cite as: arXiv:2608.12511 [cs.CR]   (or arXiv:2608.12511v1 [cs.CR] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.12511 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Shidong Pan [view email] [v1] Wed, 12 Aug 2026 18:39:57 UTC (231 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.CR < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-08 Change to browse by: cs cs.CL References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)