Explanations must match actual behavior
Aliases: policy-code alignment · disclosure fidelity · privacy drift
What it is
Notice-behavior alignment requires stated purpose, scope, recipient, and duration to match system execution. Copy can be clear, specific, and navigable yet false by omitting SDK transfer, background collection, model features, or longer retention. Alignment is continuous: a code, configuration, or vendor change can invalidate unchanged notice text.
Why it happens
Policy or product workflows maintain explanations, while code, remote configuration, pipelines, and third-party components jointly produce behavior at different speeds under different owners. Without a shared traceable mapping, new events and recipients bypass copy review and create documentation drift. The reverse also occurs when notices retain discontinued processing, imposing fictional risk and weakening trust.
Studying it
An audit decomposes notice text into testable propositions and seeks corresponding behavior through static analysis, traffic observation, permission calls, lineage, vendor logs, and retention queries. Measures include undisclosed flows, stated-but-unobserved operations, scope discrepancy, and update delay. A short session cannot establish absence of conditional or long-term behavior; account states, regions, experiments, background, and failures need coverage.
Where it stops holding
An unobserved flow is not necessarily absent, and an observed domain is not automatically an independent recipient; implementation and contractual evidence must accompany traces. Security may justify withholding exploitable detail but not data class and user consequence. Rare processing still requires disclosure and should not disappear because a test failed to trigger it.
Applying it
- Map each proposition to events, fields, processing jobs, recipients, and retention rules with shared ownership.
- Trigger a notice-diff review after code, SDK, vendor, remote-config, or schema change.
- Capture traffic and background jobs across account states in release tests and reconcile both directions with the declared inventory.
- Correct behavior exceeding notice and notice exceeding behavior; build trigger fixtures for conditional flows and block every unmapped operation or statement.