I'm building an AI that reads privacy policies for you

Thank you so much this is so cool and necessary. If you need a visual to pitch it to investors and you haven't seen it there was a great south park episode (looked it up S15E01, the human centipad) mingled with one of the best-est gross out horror-humor movies ever the human centipede.

Even after laughing at that and being raised by a lawyer I still don't read the TOS line by line like i should, again I need this.

Hi, HN!

I’m working on an AI that reads privacy policies and automatically detects privacy threats for you.

Last year I started becoming really concerned about digital privacy when I found out Facebook has always had an updated copy of my phone contacts, including nicknames and notes [1] – which basically means complete strangers now know the names I call my gf and the notes I would put on people to remember them (ex: John – that creepy guy from work) because I stored them like that. It was a total invasion of my privacy, it was too much.

But it was not so surprising, because later on I found out that Facebook explicitly says they’ll do this in their privacy policy. That same privacy policy no one reads.

So when I had to choose the topic to write my CS thesis, I was pretty sure I wanted to choose privacy – and as an AI enthusiast, I set myself to solve this problem by teaching machines to defend us, so we could all enjoy a safer internet.

After some research and training data, I managed to create a Recurrent Neural Network that tells apart potential privacy threats in policies (like “we will sell your data”) from neutral or privacy-friendly sentences (like “we anonymize your data even before it reaches our servers”).

I’m building this for people that value their privacy. I think you guys might appreciate it, so I’d love to hear what you think. The main problem now is that, as in any deep learning model, it needs a huge amount of data to be trained accurately. The AI is not very precise right now. You can help push privacy as a larger concept forward just by playing a simple game that (a) will let you know some of the biases you may have when you face privacy “dilemmas” while (b) it will further teach the AI what’s privacy friendly and what’s not [2].

Right now this is an academic experiment turned webapp (we’ll probably publish a paper later this year) – but in the future I’d like to build a set of tools that actively act as countermeasures to these privacy threats [3], and I’d like to monetize the project that way.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16661735 [2] https://privacyreader.useguard.com/experiment [3] https://useguard.com