Carnegie Mellon News

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) and Microsoft Research have developed a prototype automated privacy compliance system that runs on the data analytics pipeline of the Bing search engine. The researchers say their system is the first time automated privacy compliance analysis has been applied to the production code of an Internet-scale system. The researchers showed that a team of just five workers can manage a daily compliance check on millions of lines of code written by several thousand developers. "During our implementation on Bing, we found that more than 20 percent of the code was changing on a daily basis," says CMU Ph.D. student and lead researcher Shayak Sen. At these large scales, automated methods offer the best hope of verifying compliance. As part of the project, the researchers developed a new programming language, called Legalease, that could be easily learned and used by privacy advocates. To read further, please visit http://www.cmu.edu/news/stories/archives/2014/may/may21_privacycompliance.html.