Harnessing Generative AI for Enhancing User Privacy Awareness: An Examination of Privacy Statements and GenAI systems

In the current online landscape, an expectation is placed upon users of websites to be aware of the fate of their data upon its disclosure. There are only a few mechanisms that exist to achieve this ideal, and even fewer tools to aid users in understanding why it is important. This paper aims to raise user privacy awareness through analysing various Generative Artificial Intelligence tools’ ability to assess privacy statements. Firstly, a content analysis was implemented to assess the privacy statements on their alignment against the Information Privacy Principles within the New Zealand Privacy Act. Subsequently, the performance of ChatGPT, Claude AI and Gemini tools was compared against the human-interpreted analyses of the privacy statements. The findings infer that a high level of trust can be placed in GenAI tools when assessing user privacy rights on websites, though with a prior awareness of the implications and potential for error.