Mannheim Privacy Policy Panel (MaPPP)

1. Short Description

The Mannheim Privacy Policy Panel (MaPPP) contains the texts of 1,775,388 million privacy policies posted by 311,539 German firms between 2012 and 2021. The files were collected from the Internet Archive via the Wayback Machine. The MaPPP is an unbalanced quarterly panel.

For details on the data construction, consult the data appendix of the following paper:

Ganglmair, B., J. Krämer, and J. Gambato. 2024. Regulatory Compliance with Limited Enforceability: Evidence from Privacy Policies. Unpublished manuscript, available at https://ssrn.com/abstract=4600876.

2. Data Files

The repository contains 40 RDA files (R data files) with quarterly observations from Q1 2012 through Q4 2021. Each RDA file contains a data frame "mappp.policies" with 6 variables. The unique identifier for a policy is a firm_ID-period combination.

Variable
Description
Example

firm_ID
firm identifier (crefo number; with suffix DE the same as the Orbis' BvDID
2010000001

period
Quarter of the observation, in date format. January 1 (-01-01) is Q1; April 1 (-04-01) is Q2; July 1 (-07-01) is Q3; October 1 (-10-01) is Q4.
2018-07-01

date
Date the policy was posted
2018-08-31

content
Text of the privacy policy.
(string)

wordcount
Simple word count
2522

URL
URL of the privacy policy (not the Web Archive's address)

http://wiener-conditorei.de/datenschutz/

3. Data Access

Access is restricted. Contact Bernhard Ganglmair at [e-mail] if you are interested in using the MaPPP for your research.

4. Citation

Cite the following paper when using the data:

Ganglmair, B., J. Krämer, and J. Gambato. 2024. Regulatory Compliance with Limited Enforceability: Evidence from Privacy Policies. Unpublished manuscript, available at https://ssrn.com/abstract=4600876.