
I'm building an AI that reads privacy policies for you - rameerez
https://privacyreader.useguard.com/experiment
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idDriven
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.

~~~
rameerez
I'm a big South Park fan, also loved that episode (and the original movie). It
didn't cross my mind to use that specific thing to explain the project, but
kinda makes sense! Grotesque but effective.

------
rameerez
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](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16661735)
[2]
[https://privacyreader.useguard.com/experiment](https://privacyreader.useguard.com/experiment)
[3] [https://useguard.com](https://useguard.com)

