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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: 4, Insightful) by crafoo on Sunday February 11 2018, @12:25AM

    by crafoo (6639) on Sunday February 11 2018, @12:25AM (#636182)

    If an AI can read and summarize it,
    then an AI can write it.

    Can we get an AI to pass the bar? That would be hilarious.

    Let me summarize all EULAs, ToS, privacy policies for everyone: "We are going to fuck you. We are going to sell every bit of information the law allows us to and then sell the rest and claim the Ooopsie-Woopsie defense later. Suck it."

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