Open Terms Archive – Follow changes to terms of service | Hacker News Reader

Open Terms Archive – Follow changes to terms of service

opentermsarchive.org

171 pointsReventlov25 comments

Great website collecting emails with no Terms of Service (https://www.opentermsarchive.org/en/terms-of-service) and an almost empty privacy policy (https://www.opentermsarchive.org/en/privacy-policy)

"The tracking opt-out feature requires cookies to be enabled."

Why not opt-in via cookies?

That way the site can hide the cookie banner for you and continue to show it for new visitors (which have no cookies set)

But it should still be not-tracking until you agree (i.e. if you have no cookies set).

The GitHub says you can use RSS. Perhaps open an issue about the email collection and privacy policy concerns.

https://github.com/ambanum/OpenTermsArchive#by-rss

> Great website collecting emails with no Terms of Service

That is quite ironic.

From the website: "Large digital companies today occupy a central position which ... However, they communicate in an insufficiently clear, readable and continuous manner on these ToS"

It's not just large digital companies that need a decent ToS and privacy policy. They are collecting emails and could be spamming everyone with junk mail, selling them along with the companies people are interested in. Probably not but they don't say so.

Setting something like this up has been an idea of mine for a while. Glad someone's done it.

Being able to get simple plain-text diffs of documents (preferably through git) that you've agreed to or signed should be the expected standard. Not just for privacy policies online, but for any contractual change in our personal and work lives.

Here's Facebook's Privacy Policy from the Open Terms Archive: https://github.com/ambanum/OpenTermsArchive-versions/commits....

Same! I am happy somebody built this.

What I would add to this project is a highlight/alert of Warrant Canaries.

If the Warrant Canarie changes an alert can be brought up.

Diffing texts is not the way to go, because sometimes they can change the wording without changing the meaning - yet, the diff will give you a lot to sift through in order to answer the question "what has changed?"

A better approach is proposed in this paper: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-76663-4_...

It discusses a formal notation of privacy terms, which enables you to treat them like tuples and perform all sorts of set algebra operations with them, making it easy to answer questions such as "what has changed?", "what has been removed?" or "what was added?"

This would make it possible not only to compare a policy with another version of itself, but also compare it with policies of competing services and products.

Consumers would be better off if regulators mandated the storage of policies in a format like this one. An ecosystem of utilities could be built around them (change trackers, search engines, recommendation systems, etc.).

While the solution proposed in that paper is theoretically better, its feasibility is super low given how fragmented and disparate these companies make the documents and how tough it would be to lobby for a standard. As such, for now, the diff route is the most realistic way to go.

We cannot dismiss a solution to status quo for a solution that assumes an imaginary state of affairs.

Looks like you can browse the changes without subscribing here: https://github.com/ambanum/OpenTermsArchive-versions

In my startup, we added our tos and privacy policy in source control from early on.

https://github.com/Quolum/quolum.github.io/commits/master/pr...

I think more startups could do this, and make the changes publicly viewable. And maybe tag each other using a universal moniker.

I also do this. I realise it being in the git repo isn't possible for many companies, but there really should be a diff view.

In my project I actually use git to generate a diff (at compile time) that is shown to the user. They can either view the diff to the last version of the terms they accepted, or the whole terms. In that view they can also directly export their data and delete their user account if they deem the new terms to be unacceptable.

I think this should be a standard everywhere, but of course it's a futile dream and people don't seem to mind the status quo.

I kind of expected a GitHub repo, so that one can see changes with diffs.

EDIT: They are (thx to comment by xPaw). Wasn't obvious from the landing page prompting to sign up for email updates.

Emails are not that tempting. I am getting them from service providers anyway - and it is practically impossible to see what are the CHANGES and which changes do matter.

They should offer just the diffs online first instead of collecting email addresses

You can get them in the Github repo. Here's Facebook's privacy policy: https://github.com/ambanum/OpenTermsArchive-versions/commits...

I did something like this as an excuse to play around with “git scraping” but it had weird frequent issues with character encodings or something on many requests. I never had the time to dig in to that so eventually just archived it.

https://github.com/cdubz/legal-copy-histories

It seems this is run by the "Office of the French Ambassador for Digital Affairs": cool initiative, see their readme on GitHub:

https://github.com/ambanum/OpenTermsArchive-versions

Google actually provides history and diffs for its own terms, although I don't think there's a way to get notifications.

https://policies.google.com/terms/archive

Could somebody ELI5 the legal basis for terms that automatically change without your consent being binding? What keeps a ToS update from promising an extra month of service for a paltry $1M each? Are those waters tested much in court yet?

I was expecting this to show me a pretty timeline of diffs but instead it emails you the diff (I presume) when a change occurs. Kind of useful I guess, but I don't really fancy signing up to it.

I was trying to add a service that wasn't included yet and the preview of the ToS document was overlaid by huge versions of the graphic assets found on the original URL, so that the document was unreadable and it was impossible for me to mark the salient parts.

Edit: opened an issue on their Github, adding another document from a different site worked very well

Hello everyone

Thank you for your interest for Open Terms Archive. As a reminder, OTA is the database of all ToS and their modifications for all companies in the world, in all languages, for all countries. Everything in a format that can be easily used to create applications.

We have updated our privacy policy, thank you for pointing out that it was not complete. The only personal data we record is the email of a person who subscribes to the email notification service for changes to a document of their choice.

As mentioned below, it is perfectly possible to follow the modifications of a document without giving your email address: - by RSS feed https://github.com/ambanum/OpenTermsArchive#by-rss - by browsing the repository https://github.com/ambanum/OpenTermsArchive-versions

@indus: very nice idea to store your privacy policy in github! @stared, @barredo: also a good idea, we will add, upon selection of service and document type, a direct link to github story see all changes. This way you can get a good idea of what you might receive by email if you decide to subscribe @cdubzzz: awesome, we will add the services you used to track on https://github.com/cdubz/legal-copy-histories/tree/master/hi... @jvolkman: very cool indeed but we have decided to not take their word for it @remram, thanks for the tip, we will contact them. We also already work with https://tosdr.org/ @tcmb, if you have any problem while adding a document on OTA, you can join us anytime at contact@opentermsarchive.org

If you want to help us, you can :

- Add or edit services and documents via a Pull Request on Github (read our documentation about it: https://github.com/ambanum/OpenTermsArchive/blob/master/CONT...). You can also use the contribution interface (https://opentermsarchive.org/en/contribute) which is useful for people who don't know Github (but it doesn't work for all sites).

- Build tools from the dataset (https://github.com/ambanum/OpenTermsArchive-versions/release...) or the API (https://disinfo.quaidorsay.fr/api/open-terms-archive/docs). As an example we have built Scripta Manent (https://disinfo.quaidorsay.fr/en/open-terms-archive/scripta-...), a tool that allows to compare a document between two dates.

- Improving our source code (https://github.com/ambanum/OpenTermsArchive): our biggest task is to add document tracking in several languages and jurisdictions, which is far from being an easy task.

- Raise awareness of the project and help us find funding so that OTA can continue to develop and become a digital commons.

- Follow us on Twitter @OpenTerms where we post changes to documents that we find interesting.

Thank you !

Thanks for clarifying

Maybe they should join forces with https://tldrlegal.com/

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