English

Attack on Unfair ToS Clause Detection: A Case Study using Universal Adversarial Triggers

Computation and Language 2022-11-29 v1

Abstract

Recent work has demonstrated that natural language processing techniques can support consumer protection by automatically detecting unfair clauses in the Terms of Service (ToS) Agreement. This work demonstrates that transformer-based ToS analysis systems are vulnerable to adversarial attacks. We conduct experiments attacking an unfair-clause detector with universal adversarial triggers. Experiments show that a minor perturbation of the text can considerably reduce the detection performance. Moreover, to measure the detectability of the triggers, we conduct a detailed human evaluation study by collecting both answer accuracy and response time from the participants. The results show that the naturalness of the triggers remains key to tricking readers.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2211.15556,
  title  = {Attack on Unfair ToS Clause Detection: A Case Study using Universal Adversarial Triggers},
  author = {Shanshan Xu and Irina Broda and Rashid Haddad and Marco Negrini and Matthias Grabmair},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2211.15556},
  year   = {2022}
}

Comments

Accepted at NLLP@EMNLP2022

R2 v1 2026-06-28T07:15:20.143Z