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p/guardAn AI that reads privacy policies for you
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rameerez

Guard - An AI that reads privacy policies for you

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Did you know Tinder shares your private conversations and matches?
They're pretty straightforward about it in their privacy policy.
Guard is an Artificial Intelligence that reads privacy policies for you and spots the threats in them. Protect your privacy.

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rameerez
Maker
Hi PH! 👋 So excited to be launching something again! 🚀 Meet Guard, an 🧠 Artificial Intelligence that reads privacy policies for you and warns you of the biggest privacy threats in the digital services you use. 🤓 This is actually the basis of my thesis on AI and Natural Language Processing (NLP), and it's been super fun to work on this problem with such an interesting technology. For the moment Guard is a website that spits out some of the AI results in a simple, organized and visual way. It also includes some other relevant information such as recent data breaches and instructions to delete your accounts and data on those services. But I'd love to hear your feedback on what should this project become next! 💻 Actually, I've been working on a spinoff: an app that helps you protect your digital privacy. It's like an antivirus, but for privacy threats instead of viruses. This is only a rough prototype right now, but I'd also love to hear your thoughts on it! https://useguard.com/blog/future/ Also happy to answer any Qs about the tech behind this! :)
Ludwig
Wow, congratulation on the launch, inspiring product! Curious on how the scores adapt if the privacy policy changes? Will it then be scored based on the trained AI - which at best is already generalised enough?
rameerez
Maker
@ludwig_stumpp Thank you! These are my plans for when a privacy policy changes: Guard should automatically fetch it, re-analyze it and re-calculate the score based on the new input. This should be a rather simple process, provided the AI already knows how to analyze new unseen input. Measuring under/overfitting and aiming for correct generalization is something I'm doing for the thesis so hopefully this automatic process will work with good precision!
Pete
Looks great! I think you should add the fact about Tinder on here so people are aware.
rameerez
Maker
@petecodes Good tip, just added! Thank you Pete!
Luke Oslizlo
I love the idea, because let’s be honest - nobody has time to read the super long privacy policies
rameerez
Maker
@lukaszmtw Thanks! Interesting fact -- from research I've read, this number is actually measured: only 0.001% of internet users even **start** reading privacy policies, so the number of people that **finish** reading them must be much lower! And, if you had to read all the privacy policies you accepted just in the past 5 years, you would need 3.040h of non-stop reading!
Akshay Kadam(A2K)
Amazing product. What kind of tech did you use for Guard?
rameerez
Maker
@deadcoder0904 broadly speaking, it's deep learning: it's a deep neural network (based on a specific type of recurrent neural network architecture) that models the language and "understands" what it says to classify it either as friendly or dangerous. I can also get into the super technical details if you'd like :) Regarding the actual tools I used, it's Python 3.6 + Pytorch for the AI part (and a bunch of the typical libraries like pandas, nltk, numpy et al.), and Ruby on Rails for the web app.
Alex Wawl
@deadcoder0904 @rameerez " I can also get into the super technical details if you'd like :)" - I would love to here about technical details, I'm really interesting about it. One little question by the way - where did you get datasets for training? In the internet you can find a lot of "standard" datasets which help to detect spam/bulling/sentiment analyze/etc but how do you define "bad" and "good" words for privacy?
Liam Roberts
Super interesting product! Keen to see how it develops. Can you please link us to your own Privacy Policy? I cannot seem to find it on your website. My suggestion would be to have your Privacy Policy a touch more accessible especially if 1. you are a company criticising poor Privacy Policies; and 2. you are generating data from users with the 'Teach the AI' function.
rameerez
Maker
@liam_roberts Sure, it's here: https://useguard.com/blog/privac... There's more info about it in /experiment Also, this is mostly a personal project (vs a company) + users are informed how exactly their data will be used (see /experiment) + this is mostly for science (did this project as the basis of my academic thesis)
Daniel Teo
Great job! Possible to make it into a chrome extension and flag to the user should the privacy policy on a website have a very poor grade?
Tom Jones
Hi @rameerez your product sounds great but I think your SSL certificate is invalid as I can’t access your site. Thought I’d let you know.
rameerez
Maker
@tjthomsonjones That's weird, looks good on my side and no one has reported this... would you mind sharing more details on the error you're getting?
Tom Jones
@rameerez On Chrome it displays the message: This site can’t provide a secure connection useguard.com sent an invalid response. ERR_SSL_PROTOCOL_ERROR Let me know if that helps.
rameerez
Maker
@tjthomsonjones Thanks for the details! Could you please try opening the website on another device like your smartphone and checking if it works there? From what I'm reading, this error might actually be related to your device not having the correct time and date set up – let's see if switching devices solves the issue to rule out a server SSL misconfig issue. Also, if anyone else encounters the same error, please let me know!
Tom Jones
@rameerez I just tried in another browser and on an iPad and the problem persists. Have you checked the SSL certificate of the site for EU countries?
rameerez
Maker
@tjthomsonjones Yes, I've tested the site on multiple computers in multiple countries (at least a couple dozen different people from around the world). I myself live in the EU. Plus, the SSL cert is issued by LetsEncrypt which is one of the most widely used and accepted providers as far as I'm concerned. And I've just checked and everything looks fine and updated. One thing that happened with one person, though, was that their business firewall was blocking the website because apparently the same IP or domain I'm using had been flagged years ago by some antivirus software – and if I recall correctly the error msg was similar to that of an SSL error. I contacted the antivirus company and they lifted the ban, but might it be that something similar is happening in your network? Can you maybe try using your smartphone with mobile data, not wifi, and see if the error persists?
Ben Greenwood
F***ing Brilliant idea. So how do we go about adding other sites to the list?
rameerez
Maker
@bengreenwood Thanks Ben! This is a first MVP so the number of initial sites is limited, but as the projects develops I'll be adding more! There's also a button to suggest sites towards the bottom of the landing page :) Maybe I might also consider allowing people to add new sites themselves
Ana
Amazing product! Just the perfect one for all the people that are increasingly concerned about digital privacy.
Alexander Spoor
Wow, that Tinder one is scary. Thanks for creating this!
rameerez
Maker
@alexanderspoor Thank you for checking it out! :) Please let me know if you feel anything is missing or if you have ideas on how it could be improved!
Alexander Spoor
@rameerez There is one thing actually, could you perhaps make it more obvious that one can click on any of the Privacy Policy annotations to tweet them directly? I only found out by accident, and it's actually the first action I wanted to take upon reading the line in question.
Bryan Lovgren
We built a Privacy policy grader that finds, consumes, and grade privacy policies in real time via browser extension. We were able to tell users what data a policy collects, how it's used, and how it's shared. Unfortunately we included the tech in a product that did not make money so now it's sitting on a shelf. All that to say I admire what Guard is trying to accomplish.
Miguel Guerrero
Awesome product and very much needed, Guard congrats @rameerez
rameerez
Maker
@miguelguerrero1 Thank you! :)
David A Cardona N
The simpleness and having the ability to know how my data is used !!
johnny makes ⚡️
A creative solution to a real problem. Ts & Cs are designed to bury information but realistically no one has the time to read them – look forward to trying this! 💪
Naveed Ahmad
hi there...its wonderful idea....I am interested to read your thesis, is it possible for you to send me @n.ahmad@uop.edu.pk
Adam Cooke
Took the quiz. Got a Rails 500 at the end. Regardless though, the questions asked were rarely comparable to answering properly was impossible.
Tony Nielsen
I've been waiting for an AI product to do this. Looking forward to trying it!
Yarik
Awesome! Btw there's a funny error here https://useguard.com/products/te... 😂
Jameson Zimmer
Brilliant concept.