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. In about 30 seconds, Polisis can read a privacy policy it's never seen before and extract a readable summary, displayed in a graphic flow chart, of what kind of data a service collects, where that data could be sent, and whether a user can opt out of that collection or sharing.

How many of us could accurately say what is happening with our data right now? Are we aware of how Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and others use the data we share online every day? I suspect the vast majority of us skip past the privacy policy when signing up for websites and are therefore largely in the dark as to how our data is used. It's a quandary that prompted a team of researchers from EPFL, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the University of Michigan to develop an AI-driven program to check privacy policies for us. The work, which was documented in a recently published paper, aims to make it easier for users to understand the privacy policies they so often skip past. The team has developed a tool, called Polisis, which can be used for free either as a browser extension or from their website.

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.

It's a safe bet that some of the websites and apps you use collect and subsequently sell your personal data. But how can you know which ones? An EPFL researcher has led the development of a program that can answer that question in just a few seconds, thanks to artificial intelligence. If you're like most people, you don't always take the time to read website terms and conditions before accepting them. Not only are they extremely lengthy, they are also convoluted and written in opaque legalese.

But how can you know which ones? An EPFL researcher has led the development of a program that can answer that question in just a few seconds, thanks to artificial intelligence. If you're like most people, you don't always take the time to read website terms and conditions before accepting them. Not only are they extremely lengthy, they are also convoluted and written in opaque legalese. However, they can contain surprising clauses about a website's or app's right to use the data it collects about you, such as your IP address, your age and your online preferences.

"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. When humankind finds something difficult, we typically build a gizmo to do it for us -- and this case is no different. It turns out, reading lengthy fine-print is the expertise of a machine-learning artificial intelligence (AI) designed by researchers from the Federal Institute of Technology at Lausanne, Switzerland (EPFL), the University of Wisconsin, and the University of Michigan. Their research began with a question, said lead researcher Hamza Harkous from EPFL.

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. 'What if we turned privacy policies into a conversation?'