I'm really interested in and terms and conditions
and I don't think most people know what the terms and conditions are.
[When you say terms and conditions explain to people that typical moment so they can
really think "I know what he's talking
about.] I think of what is ridiculous--when you
try and buy something off an app store and a tiny window will pop up
and it will say "Terms and conditions do you agree to them?"
and you have page one of 312
and then a button that says "accept." Empirically what
appears to happen is people tend to spend about one and a half to two
seconds
between opening the terms conditions and clicking the accept button.
[Say that again?] This, roughly, this span, between one and a half and two seconds
between having these documents presented to them and clicking the accept button.
[Do you read the pages because you are like this expert and you know the pitfalls.]
What do you do as an individual? I am
an individual. I do exactly the same as everyone else,
with probably one caveat and the caveat would be that
I minimize my risk by having little
presence on the web. So I for example do not use Facebook
don't use Twitter. [But generally you say you do what everyone else does, what does
everyone do?]
No one scrolls through those three hundred and odd pages
or even sends the PDF no one's got time. They just say yes
And they presume that that's okay. Broadly speaking that
kind of "buyer beware" model
is risky, and it's risky as more and more personal information gets captured
and could be used for different purposes and in different ways
so I think that we need to think much more carefully about that
than we do. By analogy
the last time you got a loan, what happened?
[I had to fill out a lot of papers and it took
couple weeks.] Do you remember the sheet at the front which said "key facts?"
[Yeah, they do give you like an idiots' guide.]
Yet we don't have that for these terms and conditions. So there isn't
so there isn't a kind of key facts for what you are agreeing to. [Like an executive summary.]
Yeah,
well it's like what all they can and can't do with the data
who will, and what your rates of withdraw are.
[This sounds really fascinating, and it sounds really important. It doesn't
feel like Computer Sciences. Is this computer science? Or is this
sort of the kind of interface?] I think that the answer to that is that it is the computer science I do,
I think it is fundamentally computer science, and I think it's fundamentally to computer science,
because of a notion that I call "responsible innovation" because
if we are building systems and tools that
capture information off people, analyze those information
and make suggestions
which had profound impact on their lives,
then we have to do this in the context of understanding their rights
and responsibilities and engaging with them
as an individual as well.
So part of this is
building the tools to let that happen.
So we have constructed a little plug in that you can get
for the Chrome broswer which will look at the terms and conditions and
measure that complexity for you. There is an algorithm called SMOG
which stands for simple metric gobbledygook. It allows you to
get a measure of how complex that text is and how dense that text is.
We were able to then map that
in the UK context onto
educational attainment levels. So essentially
how much education would you have to have done in
order to be able to read the document that complex.
The basic principle of this is that what you do is you sample
the start of the beginning of the document and you look at particular measures
across this.
Long words, how many are small.
How long sentences are, how many secondary clauses there are.
So what you actually do is develop a set of matrix which
allow you to measure those and you combine those metrics together
and normalize them so that you have a measure which
shows you that these are small sentences with small words,
big complex sentences, large paragraphs,
with large words. What we found was that to be able to read
the terms and conditions, in this case for the utilities companies
for the people who
supply us all with energy, it meant that you actually had to have
a tertiary level education.
So you need at least are bachelor's degree, most likely a master's
or post doctoral level of qualification.
So, you need this in order to be able to understand the density of that text.
So that means for large segments of the population
that haven't gone... they haven't got a reading level
that will allow them read that text. So obviously the easy answers is, "But this
is a legal text and you need to be a lawyer to understand it."
Well actually it's written in such a manner that it's just hard to follow.
Okay so the second part what we did to this was we
said, well how will people make sense of this?
We marked those then to books that they may have read
so you know... so for example and books like Beowolf or,
Gulliver's Travels or
all these great classics that we all feel we should have read.
They all just lie somewhere on our shelves.
Because we got through the first few pages and thought "This is hard work."
We matched them to those and we found that that was really quite surprising.
So, you know, for example Google's most
recent changes terms and conditions are
equivalent in complexity to Beowolf,
which very few of us have managed to read all the way through. [That is a complicated book.]
Too complex for me. And similarly
and the banking sites--when we ran their text through this
they found the equivalent to Nietzsche.
And again Nietzsche is an achievement.
So the point here actually is what are we giving up
when we can't read the text? To explain what is it we are giving up
And I think part we want to try and understand is
How people make use of that data in a big data world
and how we may try and understand what we will give up
and what we will agree to. [Professor, these are important deals though that have been done though.
These are complicated concepts involving money and copyrights and licensing of products.
I mean, these can't be "The cat sat on the mat."
or are you suggesting that they are deliberately hiding truth behind....]
So, I wouldn't want to suggest that they are deliberately hiding truth...
but to be honest, I think we have all been a bit too comfortable
and a bit too lazy about what we're doing here
and so I would like us to change how we think about this before
legislation has to happen to make people change these things.
[From my watching a TV show yes I know that when someone signs a contract if
they don't know what they were signing
the contract can become null and void can't it? If you just click after
one-and-a-half seconds you haven't really made an informed decision.]
Indeed and actually legally whether that even enforceable in the UK
is actually interesting question. So the so most of the stuff is copy and paste from
the Midwest legally. However, there is a
notion of normal expectancy and what is normally expected and
normally sought. And a lot of what happens in these terms and conditions
are principally about the second-order right.
Okay, by which I mean and you saying with
uhm, a company, for example one of your utility suppliers
and within the terms and conditions you find that they will
have the rights to release your data in particular ways.
So for example one in of the terms and conditions I read recently
has right to supply to any other families or to sell
the records of your bills
you bill payments and any additional notes that they may have made about you.
So therefore means that there is a kind of release of information out there
that you neither know of or can't control.
[Does this scare you?]
Yes, as it should.
[Alright before we...] Well, well..it does me, and I think there in lies
actually the real issue... it scares me because
I've got lots of training to understand what data does and how the data
data was analyzed.
My research is actually about people don't have the
that risk perception.
Actually what is interesting in terms of the legislation framework
that exists at present is we are undergoing a shift.
We are undergoing a shift from the emphasis being
and responsibilities for these things lying with
us to them lying with the data handlers.
To lying with big business.
These are, at one point and this has been contended, but at one point
created an algorithm which would with a shared credit link to individuals a
who were a couple and be able to predict divorce within two years.
Often before individuals himself has an awareness themselves.
[Other window] Delete all your files. You run this algorithm to rewrite all file contents
and erase them and lord and behold all the content is still there.