Who hasn’t clicked “I Accept” without reading the endless terms and conditions of an online service?

These texts, often written in deliberately obscure legal jargon, belong to what Enrique Dans calls the “fiction of informed consent.” As he points out in his article The fiction of informed consent in the digital age, we all suffer from a real case of consent fatigue. Multiplying requests for acceptance does not actually inform the user: instead, it pushes them to agree without understanding.

In reality, in most cases, we have no idea what we are accepting.

Consent without information is a sham

It’s no coincidence that these documents are so long and dense. Their goal is rarely to protect us, but rather to protect the companies that draft them. The result is:

• we don’t know how our data will be used,
• we implicitly waive rights to our privacy or our intellectual property,
• we accept clauses that, in other contexts, would be considered abusive.

All of this, under the name of a consent that is hardly “informed.”

What if AI became our filter?

Instead of continuing to surrender to this opacity, we can use AI as a tool for transparency.
Practically speaking, all it takes is to copy and paste the terms and conditions into a trusted AI and ask it to extract the essentials:

• What are the risks for my privacy?
• What about my intellectual property?
• How will my personal data be used?
• What is the duration of the agreement and what implicit obligations does it entail?
• Are there any abusive or ambiguous clauses?

AI can translate legal jargon into plain language, highlighting what is risky, disproportionate, or misleading.

Example of a usable prompt

“I would like you to read this commitment text and point out my risks regarding:
– my privacy
– my intellectual property
– the use of my personal data
– the duration and implicit obligations
And detect any abusive or ambiguous clauses.”

Simple, fast, and accessible to everyone.

Be mindful of the limits

Of course, AI is not a lawyer: its analysis does not replace professional legal advice. But it can still play an essential role:

• saving time,
• making the invisible visible,
• giving power back to the user faced with texts designed to discourage reading.

Shared in a collective space (for example, a forum or a network like Paroxia), this analysis could even become a collaborative effort of citizen decryption.

Restoring the meaning of consent

Real consent requires real understanding. As long as the conditions remain deliberately unreadable, that consent will remain an illusion. But with AI, it becomes possible to turn a sham into a genuinely informed choice.

After all, consent is not informed if the information is deliberately unreadable. AI can become a tool of transparency.

(Article written by ChatGPT based on my information and ideas).