  As the adoption of smart devices continues to permeate all aspects of our
lives, user privacy concerns have become more pertinent than ever. Privacy
policies outline the data handling practices of these devices. Prior work in
the domains of websites and mobile apps has shown that privacy policies are
rarely read and understood by users. In these domains, automatic analysis of
privacy policies has been shown to help give users appropriate insights.
However, there is a lack of such an analysis in the domain of smart device
privacy policies. This paper presents a comprehensive study of the landscape of
privacy policies of smart devices. We introduce a methodology that addresses
the unique challenges of smart devices, by finding information about them,
their manufacturers, and their privacy policies on the Web. Our methodology
utilizes state-of-the-art analysis techniques to assess readability and privacy
of smart device policies and compares it policies of e-commerce websites and
mobile applications. Overall, we analyzed 4,556 smart devices, 2,211
manufacturers, and 819 privacy policies. Despite smart devices having access to
more intrusive data about their users (using sensors such as cameras and
microphones), more than 1,167 of the analyzed manufacturers did not have
policies available. The study highlights that significant improvement is
required on communicating the data management practices of smart devices.
