Artificial intelligence can help protect your
personal data
Scientists
have developed a programme that uses artificial intelligence to decipher a
website's data protection policies in the blink of an eye, and can help you
protect your personal information.
GENEVA: Scientists have developed a programme that uses artificial intelligence to
decipher a website's data protection policies in
the blink of an eye, and can help you protect your personal information.
The programme developed by researchers, including those
from Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland, can
let people know which websites and apps collect and subsequently sell their
personal data.
People do not 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, researchers said. However,
they can contain surprising clauses about a website's or app's right to use the
data it collects, such as the user's IP address, age and online preferences.
To help consumers get a better grasp of what they are
agreeing to, a team of researchers from EPFL, the University of
Wisconsin-Madison, and the University of Michigan in the US created the program
to decipher websites' data protection policies in the blink of an eye. Called
Polisis, short for privacy policy analysis, their programme 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 colour codes to
show users exactly how their data could be used," said Hamza Harkous, a
post-doc working at EPFL. "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," said Harkous, who led the project. The researchers
used artificial intelligence to teach their programme how to pick apart
websites' data protection policies, drawing on over 130,000 that they found
online. Once the text of a policy is fed into the programme, the software
scours through it in just a few seconds and displays the results in
easy-to-read visuals, researchers said.
That lets users to see at a glance which data a website
would be authorised to collect and for what purpose, they said. Users can then
make an informed decision about whether to use the website, or, in the case of
an app, download it. The programme also indicates what options users have for
refusing to share certain data and lists the potential disadvantages of each
one.
Regards
Prof. Pralhad Jadhav
Master of Library &
Information Science (NET Qualified)
Senior Manager @ Knowledge
Repository
Khaitan & Co
Twitter Handle | @Pralhad161978
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