Artificial intelligence can help you protect your personal data

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. 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. To help consumers get a better grasp of what they're agreeing to, a team of researchers from EPFL, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the University of Michigan have developed a program that uses artificial intelligence to decipher websites' data protection policies in the blink of an eye. Called Polisis, short for privacy policy analysis, their program can be used free of charge either as a browser extension (for Chrome of Firefox ) or directly on their website. "Our program uses simple graphs and color codes to show users exactly how their data could be used. For instance, some websites share geolocation data for marketing purposes, while others may not fully protect information about children. Such clauses are typically buried deep in their data protection policies," says Hamza Harkous, a post-doc working at EPFL's Distributed Information Systems Laboratory and the project lead. With a little help from machine learning