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I'd really love to see an app which monitors changes in terms and conditions for different apps and services so that I am notified whenever something changes.
There seems to be a related browser extension (which is recommended elsewhere in this thread by egjerlow), https://tosdr.org, but I'm not quite sure if it will tell you when something has changed.
This seems like a nice resource for swashing through the terms and conditions jungle: https://tosdr.org/
Wow, some of these are scary. "No Right to leave the service" - Delicious "The Android app can record sound & video from your phone, at any time, without your consent" - Facebook The sweetest of them all seems to be DDG
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wouldn't it be pretty easy to create a git repo that you seed with the a bunch of ToS, have a cron fetch them everyday or so, run `git diff` to see if there are changes, push them, tag a new release and boom anyone subscribed will be notified.
Sounds good. Another way could be to feed the ToS URL into a visual web scraper (e.g https://github.com/scrapinghub/portia , scrape, then compare and notify via email.
Idea was to just keep it as light as possible while off loading all the heavy lifting.
It's fairly common to see clauses that state the terms may change at any time without notice, and continued use of the service means you agree to any changes made. That seems completely unenforceable to me, but I am not a lawyer.
I've often fantasized about a legal framework similar to Creative Commons, but for TOS, that would protect the interests of both users and service providers.
Given that there's often a lot of boilerplate for TOS, would it be fairly easy to come up with a few heuristics for a tool that when fed the text of a TOS, could deemphasize the boilerplate and perhaps flag known problematic (or, at least, esoteric) language? Not a sophisticated AI thing, mind you, just something that cuts a little more to the chase. edit: I mean that the tool should be a dumb high-pass filter that w…
It was an interesting thought experiment, so I expanded it to my large body of private contracts that I've collected after many years of law practice. The results were less accurate (because ToS tend to follow a pretty rigid pattern, mostly), but still pretty good.
The big question is: does anyone really care about it? For example, I never look at tosdr.org because what are you going to do? negotiate a ToS? It's not as if there's any meaningful freedom of choice in this space. My personal view (not legal advice!) is that most browse-wrap ToS aren't enforceable as contracts.
I'd really love to see an app which monitors changes in terms and conditions for different apps and services so that I am notified whenever something changes.
Given that there's often a lot of boilerplate for TOS, would it be fairly easy to come up with a few heuristics for a tool that when fed the text of a TOS, could deemphasize the boilerplate and perhaps flag known problematic (or, at least, esoteric) language? Not a sophisticated AI thing, mind you, just something that cuts a little more to the chase. edit: I mean that the tool should be a dumb high-pass filter that w…
I'm a lawyer, and not an expert in AI. I once gathered a ton of Terms of Service, cleaned them up as text files, and began training a classifier. By the time I was done, it was pretty good at telling me which section heading in the typical ToS table of contents any random text belonged to. It was an interesting thought experiment, so I expanded it to my large body of private contracts that I've collected after many y…
At some point I gave in and decided a better approach would be to just point out that no sane consumer can read all that.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm a lawyer, and not an expert in AI. I once gathered a ton of Terms of Service, cleaned them up as text files, and began training a classifier. By the time I was done, it was pretty good at telling me which section heading in the typical ToS table of contents any random text belonged to. It was an interesting thought experiment, so I expanded it to my large body of private contracts that I've collected after many y…
Not a lawyer but used to read EULAs etc carefully. At some point I gave in and decided a better approach would be to just point out that no sane consumer can read all that.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm a lawyer, and not an expert in AI. I once gathered a ton of Terms of Service, cleaned them up as text files, and began training a classifier. By the time I was done, it was pretty good at telling me which section heading in the typical ToS table of contents any random text belonged to. It was an interesting thought experiment, so I expanded it to my large body of private contracts that I've collected after many y…
Not a lawyer but used to read EULAs etc carefully. At some point I gave in and decided a better approach would be to just point out that no sane consumer can read all that.
Of course that means the exact enforceable contents of every ToS ultimately boil down to case law but for customers this is a much better solution than "you may have accidentally sold your soul".