TosBack 2 / Terms of Service + Privacy Policies Archiving + Analysis

Session Topic: Creating TosBack 2 / Terms of Service + Privacy Policies Archiving + Analysis

Thursday 1F

Convener: Steve O.

Notes-taker(s): Jim F.

Tags for the session - technology discussed/ideas considered:

Terms of Service, Privacy Policies:

Link

https://tid.isoc.org/confluence/display/TOSBACK2/ToSBack2+Home

Discussion notes, key understandings, outstanding questions, observations, and, if appropriate to this discussion: action items, next steps:

The Internet Society has collaborated with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) on TOSBack2, for collecting and providing a platform for analyzing differences in Terms of Service and Privacy Policies. Steve showed a video demonstrating the TOS audit web interface.

Currently hosted in an underpowered, not really production-ready host at EFF; need to find a permanent home. Also need a long-term funding model so it will last (hosting and maintenance, etc.). But also making it production-ready. Volunteer effort, but need clueful volunteers and can’t depend on them to get the effort bootstrapped.

This started at the WSJ Data Transparency weekend (2012), browser plugin to tell you if the terms and conditions have changed.

Some discussion about how to present this to consumers. Use machine learning? But every policy is a “unique snowflake”.

Some surprise that the tool shown isn’t more HTML-aware. There’s a lot of research being done on human assistance tools so should try to leverage some of that.

We’re moving to an app-based world, so a browser plugin isn’t really sufficient.

Perhaps use law students to provide review and commentary about policy changes?

Discussion of possible tie-in to privacy icons (various efforts: perhaps as many as 20 projects?)

But writers of terms of service and privacy policies often don’t want to be transparent.

How to handle ToS changes in apps? Perhaps through the app store?

Common Terms (commonterms.net) - effort to make terms and conditions more accessible.

Check out the documentary: Terms and Conditions May Apply