People are confronted with privacy policies and terms of service agreements all the time. Most people don’t bother to read them and will agree to anything to get past those lengthy intimidating legalese even if the policy clandestinely require them to give up their life savings.
One simple solution to our privacy dilemmas would be for everyone to become fully informed about how much data is being collected, kept and sold about us. To do so, the implication is that you’d have to read all the privacy policies on the websites you visit. One research estimates that you would spend 25 days out of the year just to read those policies.
Well, here’s the good news: A group of researchers have developed a tool known as Polisis to help you visualize privacy policies to enable you make sense of them. The tool uses machine learning to analyze any privacy policy on the internet and in 30 seconds creates a readable summary in colorful graphic charts that reveal how companies use your data, what third parties receive it, and what you can do about it. Here’s what I discovered about Facebook’s privacy policy after I analyzed it with Polisis:
The tool comes in the form of a browser add-on, which you can click on when you visit a website to see the analysis of its privacy policy. Polisis’ creators have also built a robo chat interface they call Pribot that’s designed to answer questions and provide advice about any privacy policy. They hope those tools can unlock the secrets of how tech firms use your data that have long been hidden in plain sight.
