This Data Viz Tool Explains Privacy Policies You're Too Lazy To Read

One study from 2016 showed that people will agree to anything to get past that daunting mess of legalese; 98% of the study's participants didn't realize that the policy for a fake social networking site gave all their personal information to the NSA and even required them to give up their first born child. But a new project called Polisis poses a way to make these policies easier to understand: visualize them. The tool uses machine learning to analyze any privacy policy on the internet and creates flow charts that reveal how companies use your data, what third parties receive it, and what you can do about it. While it's a great tool for understanding exactly what any website is doing with your data, Polisis has an even larger goal: to create an entirely new interface for privacy policies. Polisis is the result of an AI system Harkous first created when making a chatbot, called Pribot, that would be able to answer any questions you might have about a service's privacy policy. To build the bot, Harkous and the team of researchers he worked with needed to be able to understand exactly what each privacy policy was saying.