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posted by martyb on Saturday February 10 2018, @07:57PM   Printer-friendly
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


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by requerdanos on Saturday February 10 2018, @10:16PM

    by requerdanos (5997) Subscriber Badge on Saturday February 10 2018, @10:16PM (#636140) Journal

    You can wax eloquent in your labels if you manufacture food in the US.

    If you package oil (almost pure fat) in a spray can [scientificpsychic.com], you can get away with saying that it has "Total fat 0 grams" of fat-free goodness.

    (See, "less than half a gram of fat per serving" is the legal definition of "fat free," and a "serving" of spray-fat is, you guessed it, less than half a gram.)

    You can use the stuff to oil squeaky hinges and rusty bolts; the handwaving doesn't take any of the oil out of the oil can.

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