A project on privacy policies that the Center on Law and Information Policy (CLIP) helped put together was mentioned in a Futurism article.
“I have read and understood…” has got to be one of the biggest lies people commit on a regular basis. It’s the typical ending for the long-winded customer agreements or privacy policies attached to every online service, which few ever read. Or at least, not in their entirety.
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“What if we visualize what’s in the policy for the user?” Harkous said in an interview with WIRED. “Not to give every piece of the policy, but just the interesting stuff.”
The question led to Polisis, which is short for “privacy policy analysis.” It works as a website and browser extension that can read and make sense of terribly long privacy policies in web services that cost users both time and, ultimately, money. Polisis can pull a website’s privacy policy and read it in around 30 seconds. It then comes up with a summary and a graphic flowchart that highlights how the online service handles a user’s data.
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The researchers trained Polisis using data sets from 115 privacy policies, analyzed and annotated by Fordham Law students, and 130,000 others taken from Google Play Store apps. What makes this AI appealing is how it’s able to transform a boring, wordy privacy policy into something that’s digestible. And if users are still having trouble with aspects of the agreement, the researchers have another service on their website — an AI-powered chatbot called PriBot that users can discuss privacy policies with.
