Check Out This One Kickass Use of ChatGPT

It was bound to happen eventually - I found a single legitimate use for ChatGPT

Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash

I was talking to a friend the other day who was complaining about how difficult it is for them to know pretty much anything about what was happening with their personal data for the apps they use. I asked my standard, "Well, did you read the privacy policy?" to which my friend scoffed and said of course not. Even if she had time to read it, she wouldn't understand it anyway. So why bother? 

She has a good point. The best privacy policies are still difficult to read if you don't know what you are looking for, and the average privacy policy might as well be written in Aramaic for all the more that people understand it. Plus, there are some companies who intentionally make their privacy policies hard to understand because they are doing some shady shit with your data. It would be awesome, I thought if there was a way I could help people quickly and easily parse through a privacy policy so they could understand it. If only there was a tool or a chatbot or some kind of machine that learned and could parse through this information and present it in an easy-to-understand summary.

Then, the lightbulb went off. A no-shit, good usage of ChatGPT -- translating Privacy Policies to be easy to understand human readable. 

Why is this a good use? 

There are a few reasons: 

• You don't have to share any of your personal data - win! 

• The privacy policy is already public, so you aren't sharing anything the company can get salty about 

• Summarizing documents like a privacy policy is something that tools like ChatGPT excel at. 

• But more than anything else, it helps you understand what you are agreeing to with a privacy policy. 

Before diving in here - remember that Chatbots like ChatGPT are good at summarizing, but will also hallucinate and give inaccurate results some of the time. You should always double-check things that look off, or you are concerned about. Nothing in this column is legal advice. 

Awesome, let's do it. 

How to make ChatGPT Make Privacy Policy Easy to Understand

1. Find the privacy policy of the company you want to understand and summarize. I'll use Substack's Privacy Policy 

2. Highlight and copy the entire page - every piece of text!

3. Go to ChatGPT 

4. Enter the prompt:

   1. Can you help me understand this privacy policy? Include what the company can do with my data, what my rights are, and anything I should be concerned about in the policy." 

5. Before you hit enter on the prompt, paste the whole privacy policy that you copied in Step 2 into the text box. Then hit Enter 

6. ChatGPT will churn out an easy-to-understand summary of the privacy policy, and the "concerns" section calls out areas that you should pay closer attention to. 

Then, you can ask any questions about things you don't understand or what more information:

• what does data retention mean?

• what is legitimate business use?

• what is an affiliate?

Play around with the questions you ask, and ask them in different ways. You can even just ask ChatGPT to state the answer in a different way. Just ask it questions like you were talking to a real person. With ChatGPT, you can dig into what data you are giving up, and how it's being used, and any major concerns, all in just a few minutes. 

Similar Uses

What's better, you can use this for other complex documents as well. Try the same thing with a Terms of Service, for example, or an End-User License Agreement. Anything that is public on the internet is fair game. It might be tempting to drop something like an employment agreement into ChatGPT, but be cautious there. Employment agreements are often confidential and if the content of that agreement is used to train the model, you could end up in hot water, which you don't want. 

If you read Byte-Sized Ethics regularly, you know I actually prefer Anthropic’s Claude. You can do the exact same thing with claude as you can with ChatGPT. Same goes for Inflection’s Pi, or whatever your preferred chatbot is.

There you have, one kick-ass, super useful way to use ChatGPT or any other chatbot. 

What is your one, super useful way to use ChatGPT? Let me know in the comments!