Ask HN: Any “Git diff”-like service but for when terms of conditions changes? One gets the terms of conditions updates via email, like linked-in, or just as start-up popup when you init the app, like xcode, anything that helps to understand exactly what changed especially for well-known apps? |
We have attorneys on staff and looked into other tools, but understand that about half of the contracts that live on the web are not webpages, but versioned PDFs and could not find anyone that can catch when that occurs, so we built it ourselves.
When a change occurs we email a redline (diff) and in the process of working on a dashboard that you can see not only the version of the contract when you submitted it and the new one, but overtime be able to scroll through all previous versions of that contract too...very much inspired by Google Maps Street View timeline tool. :)
If you summarized and posted the terms and the latest changes for some of the big vendors for free.
So maybe you would summarize iTunes, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Dropbox etc for people and they can be made aware of what they agreed to or not.
I don't think this would impinge on your business product too much since companies are presumably not sending this kind of thing your way. (Although, maybe they are in which case I don't know if it makes sense.)
We will give you your money back if you find a material error in any of our reports. If we fail to alert you of a material issue, we will give you twice what you paid us.
With that said, you should not use us as a replacement for an attorney. If you need help assessing something that is mission critical to you or your business, or that involves high potential liability, you should hire an attorney to review our report with you.
Hope that answers your questions and cheers!
Here is some un-solicited (hopefully) constructive feedback, which you are free to ignore:
Your website makes it very hard to sign up! The landing page only seems to offer a newsletter subscription, and it's not immediately clear which of the business services does what. Once I land on TermsAlert, AT FIRST it seems like there's no automated onboarding -- but after further inspection, it becomes that there is? I feel like this should stand out much more.
Code: SAVE40
Happy Monday!
Or
You can build your own https://github.com/pde/tosback2-data
Disclaimer: I'm the author, and I'm happy to answer questions.
https://www.followthatpage.com
I use Follow That Page to monitor about a dozen websites for things like news and events, changes to a change log.txt, and so on. It would work well for TOS and TOC web pages.
Another (free) is https://tosdr.org , which reviews many agreements but I don't know of a diff feature in it.
I have read & then saved agreements to a common directory (with memorable names & dates) when agreeing to them, and wrote a little script (assumes *nix) that basically converts the html to text using w3m or such, shortens lines (or every long line looks different), then runs diff. Maybe I could post it at my simple site if there is interest (or see lukecall.net for an email address in the footer, and ask).
(Of course, that doesn't work for the ones that don't let you save the agreement content, short of doing a screen capture.)
(I posted my thoughts or rants about this problem at http://lukecall.net/e-9223372036854587150.html , and will add a link to this discussion as a resource.... Hm. My page links to a related discussion on slashdot.org where a minority of comments are somewhat interesting, like the one with "IAAL" in its text.)
Is there some movement to standardize ToS and such agreements, so you can just recognize "oh yeah, it's just agreement #7 again" and not have to bother further (similarly to CC or known FLOSS licenses?)
I have been considering releasing a product only for tracking ToS only but haven't managed to release it yet.