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from the when-the-party-of-the-first-part... dept.
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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 10 2018, @08:16PM (4 children)
to solve this little problem.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by fyngyrz on Saturday February 10 2018, @08:21PM (1 child)
Lawyers are strong AI. Sort of. And they are the problem.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 10 2018, @08:59PM
What's this...? The Pool of Heroes just spit out two half-eaten candy bars in response to your comment! Hahahahahhahahahahhahahahahahaha!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I've never seen such incorrectness of ultimatum...! Such a fuckin' thing! How does it feel now that your True Ferocity has not only been revealed to all, but been found to be utterly useless as well? You thoroughly disgust me. Your continued existence will only serve to poison everything around you with your sheer worthlessness. Vanish. Vanish. Vanish. Vanish. Vanish. Vanish. Vanish. Disappear!
(Score: 3, Informative) by Ethanol-fueled on Saturday February 10 2018, @11:17PM (1 child)
This problem doesn't have to be limited to privacy policies, but rather any policy. What steams my weenies is when entities you depend on change their policies and those changes are significant and detrimental. Of course nobody's going to read 10 pages of dense English and the vast majority of policy changes are for inconsequential things, but if you've come to be used to a specific behavior and that behavior changes, you can be really fucked by your sloth and naiveté. I found this out the hard way when I discovered by accident that my credit union was now starting to behave like a big bank.
Projects such as this one are definitely relatively low-hanging fruit which should be tackled. I don't know much law but I do have a good knack for translating complicated English into terse statements even simpletons can understand. Your English translations were a bitch to read misters Freud, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy; but they have served me well.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 11 2018, @07:52AM
You mean like https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/04/facebook-timeline [eff.org] or http://mattmckeon.com/facebook-privacy/ [mattmckeon.com]
The latter requires JS, here are the images. 1 [mattmckeon.com] 2 [mattmckeon.com] 3 [mattmckeon.com] 4 [mattmckeon.com] 5 [mattmckeon.com] 6 [mattmckeon.com]