SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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: 3, Interesting) by Hyperturtle on Sunday February 11 2018, @12:29AM
Anyone here read Douglas Adams book Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (he's more famously known as the author of The Hitchhiker's Guide)?
He has prior art I think; he invented the Electric Monk, a monk that you bought so that it could believe in things for you. When people came to the door, just let the visitor talk to the Monk -- especially those people that ignore the "No Solicitor's" sign.
The Monk believed in everything for you, so that you could go about your life doing other more important things that required logic and dealing with facts.
Of course, when you cross the Monk with cable television (and I imagine if made today, the Internet), it tends to end up believing some pretty weird things, or so how the book played out...
But the point is, an AI reading the policy for you in no way makes it agree to any of that, just like how the description in the book of how the Monk's owners didn't actually believe any of that stuff it did.
I doubt an AI owned by another company can do a good job keeping things private for you, since this states it only reads the privacy policies out there for you. It's not responsible for what happens once you click next to continue...After alll, you'd need a Yes Man of some kind if you wanted something to *Agree* to things for you... and some sort of legal framework to make sure that as your proxy, only its privacy is violated and not yours!. Having a robotic overlord read to me legal filler from somewhere doesn't really help much beyond the chance that the robot paperclip potentially being able to give advice based on the document type...
Maybe if that if we consider that corporations are people, you can get a Yes Man corporation of some kind that operates the Privacy AI on your behalf as a service, and you can be your own customer and shareholder at once, compelling them what to do but not being responsible for your own actions as passed through the Yes Man corporation?
(unfortunately not only did they say we don't read privacy polices, I also didn't read the fine article... wired is sort of like the mondo 2000 of the modern internet. just as it was then as wired is now, it may be worth a look now and then but usually the same info can be found in a less gimmicky way elsewhere)