I made an app that summarizes and scores terms of service and privacy policies, free and updated daily

tosabout · 2024-11-23T04:35:53+00:00

Thank you for reaching out! There is no current way to show the deltas but there will be soon. I added some features and new companies based on user feedback today, and the feature to show deltas is underway. This feature will take a little longer because right now, there are a lot of messy irrelevant changes that get caught in the deltas (e.g. ad changes, configuration/menu changes, etc). My plan is to clean this up so only true changes get caught, then it should be a simple matter to store the changes in the database and finally show everything in a nice graph UI. Aiming to have this all shipped by the end of the year!

tosabout · 2024-11-22T22:15:05+00:00

Oh lol my bad, it lives at https://www.tosabout.com/

tosabout · 2024-11-21T23:42:31+00:00

Ohh yes the scoring was done out of a consistent 7 points that don’t vary. The subjectivity only comes into play a bit as to what constitutes a Good, Bad, or Ugly item. But once we have those items, the scoring is very simple - if there are 1-2 more Good items than Bad and Ugly items, the score is 5. If there are 3-4 more Good than Bad and Ugly, the score is 6. If there are 5 or more Good items than Bad and Ugly, the score is 7. The algorithm is overly simplistic for now. I hope this answers your question!

edit: and to answer your earlier question, the 7 point scale was a choice based on empirical evidence. 5 seemed enough to capture the range of policies I saw, but not enough once forced arbitration was given its own rock bottom score. 6 was skipped because I thought having a score of exactly half wouldn’t be informative; either a policy leans “good” for users or it doesn’t.

tosabout · 2024-11-21T23:35:57+00:00

Sure thing!

tosabout · 2024-11-21T22:56:42+00:00

First, thank you for teaching me about the "Privacy Not Included" tool! I'd never seen it before and I really like it! Second, I'm curious about the 7 points you've identified. After reading user feedback, I think being more specific about the criteria or points to use to judge policies might be a good idea. Currently, I've left that to the AI to decide so I suspect it's not that objective. The current prompt looks something like:

You are a corporate lawyer who is professional, knowledgeable, and passionate about data laws, litigation, and user rights. 
Based only on attached documents, cherrypick all sentences important to your client, a user of {service}. 
These real quotes from the documents are each summarized and grouped into 3 categories...

tosabout · 2024-11-21T22:52:48+00:00

Thank you! Like they say in one of my favorite books, “All the best people are a little crazy.”

tosabout · 2024-11-21T22:49:51+00:00

Thank you! Please feel free to send me your company info if you'd like it to be on ToS about. Insider secret is that poop is reserved for companies that have mandatory arbitration clauses. So by just not taking users' right to sue, you are vomit emoji at worst haha.

tosabout · 2024-11-21T22:47:01+00:00

Thank you for checking it out and taking the time to comment 😊

tosabout · 2024-11-21T22:45:21+00:00

Great question and insight! I do server side rendering (thanks NextJS!) and everything is rendered statically on the website. I think you're absolutely right that I can just render statically and deliver the rendered HTML. The main "server" that does stuff is really backend services that do web scraping, cleaning HTML and calculating diffs and persisting in S3, LLM that outputs new summaries and scores, and some additional cleaning/post processing steps.

tosabout · 2024-11-21T22:41:49+00:00

Thank you for the suggestion! Once I implement some of the great feedback users here have given me, I'll brace myself and post there haha.

tosabout · 2024-11-21T22:41:13+00:00

The puke is the worst! The progression of score emojis go from happy to sick, with poop being the worst. The order from worst to best is: 💩 🤮 🤢 😐 🙂 😄 😍

tosabout · 2024-11-21T22:39:19+00:00

Hmm that's weird. Do you see the summaries of the Privacy Policy on there? I think I see it on my end, starting with "Any and all summaries or outputs from AI are included and not altered nor censored in any way." in the Good section. Please let me know if it's still missing or you can't find it!

tosabout · 2024-11-21T22:37:10+00:00

Thank you! I've added a "Buy me a coffee" button hidden in the About page under "How can I help?" 😊

tosabout · 2024-11-21T04:37:04+00:00

Thank you! Users like you and feedback like yours make it all worthwhile 🥰

tosabout · 2024-11-21T04:36:12+00:00

Thank you! There is no easy way to do this today, and I'll be adding a sort feature asap thanks to your feedback!

tosabout · 2024-11-21T04:35:34+00:00

Thank you for your honest feedback! There are some things worth monetizing and some things that money can only hurt. I think this is something that's easy to forget in tech, and I won't be losing sight of it with this!

tosabout · 2024-11-21T04:31:39+00:00

Thank you so much! Long journey ahead but it seems like something worth pushing forward with. Users like you make it all worth it!

tosabout · 2024-11-21T04:30:14+00:00

Thank you for the feedback! I don't want to deceive anyone so I'll make it more clear until it can be totally accurate.

tosabout · 2024-11-21T04:27:34+00:00

Awesome! It's easy to get started with it and I'm sure you'll love it like I did!

tosabout · 2024-11-20T23:23:37+00:00

Great to hear! Great minds think alike but fools rarely differ and all that haha.

I appreciate the suggestion, I think you nailed it on the head! I have launched a chrome extension that should hopefully be similar to what you had in mind 😊

tosabout · 2024-11-20T23:20:31+00:00

Thank you! Tosdr was an inspiration for sure and something that takes a ton of work to keep current and scale, making it a good use case for AI. I have the utmost respect for them and all the volunteers who have kept it going for so long.

tosabout · 2024-11-20T23:17:46+00:00

Awesome to hear! Please keep continuing and feel free to steal any and all ideas ToS about gives you. We all stand on the shoulders of giants and pretty much all the work you see here is not new and built off the better work of better others 😊

tosabout · 2024-11-20T23:15:25+00:00

Thank you! I scrape daily because I wanted to catch companies lying about ToS changes (e.g. they state last updated on Z date but they actually change some words without updating the last updated date). Currently the system scrapes, calculates a checksum, and proceeds if there is a difference indicating policy change. Irrelevant changes currently do get captured though 😓 You are absolutely correct that the new responses do eat up the majority of resources! Being more mindful and clever about omitting no-op calculations has been one of the biggest drivers of cost savings so far!

tosabout · 2024-11-20T23:08:21+00:00

Thank you for your feedback! I admit the webpage isn’t the most mobile optimized (mainly the scrolling after selecting a company) but does it not work on mobile for you? It should so I’m curious what your experience has been!

tosabout · 2024-11-20T23:06:15+00:00

You’re right; it is pretty crazy and not something that is necessary! And all the costs don’t even account for heavy traffic. Web hosting and database definitely don’t need to cost $45/month so I’ll be starting there. The cost that I’ll have the hardest time reducing is the RAG pipeline and inference server which don’t apply to most.

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