You don't read privacy policies. And of course, that's because they're not actually written for you, or any of the other billions of people who click to agree to their inscrutable legalese. Instead, like bad poetry and teenagers' diaries, those millions upon millions of words are produced for the benefit of their authors, not readers—the lawyers who wrote those get-out clauses to protect their Silicon Valley employers.
But one group of academics has proposed a way to make those virtually illegible privacy policies into the actual tool of consumer protection they pretend to be: an artificial intelligence that's fluent in fine print. Today, researchers at Switzerland's Federal Institute of Technology at Lausanne (EPFL), the University of Wisconsin and the University of Michigan announced the release of Polisis—short for "privacy policy analysis"—a new website and browser extension that uses their machine-learning-trained app to automatically read and make sense of any online service's privacy policy, so you don't have to.
Details at Wired
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Sunday February 11 2018, @12:48AM (1 child)
If there's one thing you can count on, it's that, regardless of the wording, any privacy policy essentially allows whoever wrote it to snoop on you, exploit your private data any which way they want, lets them sell your data to whomever they want for any reason they want, you have nothing to say about it, and you ain't getting a penny.
No need for an AI, let alone reading a privacy policy, to know what it says. I've rarely read a privacy policy that says otherwise - and when it does, it's safe to assume it doesn't describe the company's true intentions, and you shouldn't trust them anyway.
(Score: 2) by pipedwho on Sunday February 11 2018, @09:11AM
So basically, if you let the AI automatically selection the option that was in your best interest, it would always click 'Decline'. And you wouldn't be able to use anything.
AI, protecting people from themselves.