Here is how AI can help before you accept that fine print on your user agreement
Get AI to help you understand that privacy policy before you hit the "accept" button next time you sign on to that new online service
Just admit it - you never bother to read through the long-winded privacy policies before you hit "accept" when you sign up for an online service. Who has time for that? Here is your reasoning: If tens of millions of other users don't bother to check the privacy policy and use the online service just fine, then why should you waste your time?
Wake up my friend, that's called "herd mentality".
And the herd is potentially taking you off the privacy cliff.
Basically, by accepting the policy on most sites (Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, Netflix...etc.), you are forgoing your right to understand what the company is doing with your precious identity and data. Such as what? Well, such as:
- Your online activities history
- Cookies and tracking elements
- Personal information you may have provided (age, home address, contact information)
- User profile
- Computer/Device information
- Financial information
So why should you care, beyond knowing instinctively that reading through privacy policies is "good hygiene". For starters, companies routinely use your data for analytics research, personalization customization, advertising and cross-selling additional service features. You may not be too bothered about that, you say, but what happens when:
- Said company gets acquired by another? Do you have any guarantee to what the newly merged entity will do with your data?
- They decide to keep your data forever and/or sell that data to a third party?
- They revise their policies?
What you want to be able to do are a few things:
- Be notified when what you agreed to is changed or updated
- Have rights to keep track of your data at any point in time
- Ability to edit/delete your data and/or account
- Be provided with choices when certain conditions arise (such as when the company gets acquired)
- Track where your data goes or gets transferred to when a third party is involved
The reality though is most of us have no time to do any of this. Your friend Susie texts you this "must have" social media site, and you sign on immediately - right now! Privacy policy be damned!
So what are your options?
Thankfully, AI-powered bots are perfect for reading thousands of privacy policies and analyzing them faster than any human being possibly can. They are also incredibly fast at making smart recommendations on what to do based on millions of past observations.
Enter: https://pribot.org/
PriBot is the first AI/Deep-Learnng based question-answering (QA) chatbot for privacy policies. You can ask it questions about any privacy policy (given that it can grab it). It then uses the policy to answer, in real time with high accuracy and relevance questions that are posed in free-form.
Pribot also offers a visualization service called Polisis. Polisis is a unique way of visualizing privacy policies. Using deep learning, it allows you to know what is the company collecting about you, what is it sharing, and much more. You don't have to read the full privacy with all the legal jargon to understand what you are signing up for. It even has its own chrome or firefox extension so you can let it do its thing automatically on your browser.
So, you really have no excuse not to read the privacy policies next time you sign up for a service. I tried it just now, and it took less than 1 minute to get the key points of what I am signing up for before hitting the "accept button" You owe it to yourself to use AI to help cut through the words and give you what you need to know.