Show HN: Get notified when sites update their terms of service (tosnotify.com)
After reading about what happened with NightOwl yesterday [0], I thought about what it would take to be aware of things like that in the future. I created ToSNotify to automatically notify you when a website's terms change.
A harder problem I've been thinking through is how to know which terms to track, since it'd be a pain to add every site I have an account with. One idea I had is to automatically get terms for apps you have installed from the app store. Any other ideas/feedback are appreciated!
67 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 121 ms ] threadThe issue with NightOwl is that allowing automatic updating of an app is equivalent to allowing the app developer remote code execution of any arbitrary program on your machine.
Notification won't solve that problem. Disabling automatic updates does.
One question I have, why do you get emails for terms of service changes on some things but not others?
You can see example of the twitter rules change on this link: https://notify-me.rs/history?diffPath=7797308284cb6466f79b88...
If you do give it a try, let me know what you think, cuz I'm one of the founders.
Cheers!
https://www.scylladb.com/2018/10/22/the-dark-side-of-mongodb...
https://tosnotify.com/reports/example
That's probably illegal, but plenty of sites and apps will try it anyway.
We also allow you to filter changes for the specific ones that are relevant to your needs, and trigger 3rd party APIs or webhooks with the updated data, or a text diff.
Ping me if you need any help, email in profile.
It might be interesting to plug GPT-3 in and use embeddings for each clause. For example, for each website where a user has agreed already to their ToS, you could use embeddings to see which ones are similar.
Wondering if there's a chance we could chat more if you're keen! I'm on twitter @gabrielchuan
PS: I'm working on something tangentially related at https://url2format.com. It's a WIP (for now free) service that allows people to do various things with any public url such as checking metatags, generating a markdown of a url, etc. I think there's lots of interesting spaces to explore around these
1. Break licenses down into titles and paragraph sections and run an MD5 or SHA hash on each section to get a "fingerprint" of that section of the TOS.
2. Allow users to check off or redline specific sections of licenses they come across. If a license is "all green" it's approved for use by you.
3. Allow organizations and groups of individuals to share these green and redlining sections of licenses.
4. If a new license is encountered, you can then show "similar licenses you have accepted or rejected" — especially if a section is word-for-word the same.
5. If you really get into ML training you can do this not just for identical but similar sections of license acceptance/rejection.
I do love seeing the exact diffs. It's a cool tool for legal and IT teams trying to get their hands on all the clickthrough licensing they face. Let me know if you like the above ideas and, if you use them, all in return I'd ask is just credit me by name, perpetually free and royalty free, somewhere in the code for the suggestions.
My plan for getting a list of subscribed services was to get people to add a forwarder to their email account with specific keywords (i.e "thanks for creating an account" or perhaps just "unsubscribe" would be enough). This would forward to an API which would check for a recognised service and add it to the list to notify. It has some privacy implications but I think you could narrow the scope enough for people to go for it.
The other method I had considered was getting a list of places your SSO is used from Google etc. Not sure if that's possible through their API but I'm sure with enough of the hacker spirit you could work out a way.
If you go for either of those ideas I expect a lifetime VIP account! (Just kidding)
[1] https://www.legalreview.ai
I've managed to convince an entire DnD server I'm on to stop using Discord and Zoom because of their recent ToS changes, so it's not unreasonable.
https://www.mumble.info/
1. I have no idea (and am curious) how frequently ToS are updated and how often the updates are meaningful to me as an end-user as is the case with Zoom and NightOwl. It would be really interesting if you post some stats after running this service.
2a) Based on the Reddit example: 9 blocks were changed and 1 block was deleted and in a hypothetical use case where I get an e-mail notification about this I would have to read them all.
After reading them none appears substantially different as far as I am concerned as a Reddit user which makes me wonder what the SNR of this service would be as compared to deferring to the HN front page to notify me of major changes that would potentially change my usage of a product.
If I'm missing something significant in this example it would raise the issue of my capability to accurately interpret these changes and therefore whether such notifications are relevant.
2b) Perhaps the "Guidelines for Healthy Communities" changing to "Moderator Code of Conduct" could be significant to a moderator but the details aren't included in the ToS and on searching are listed in a separate document. I wonder how often a ToS reference terms in or includes agreements to other documents, presumably with this service I would have to add and read each one separately?
Overall, it's a great idea but I'm very curious how useful this will end up being in practice, if the SNR is low I'm unlikely to read all the diffs.
For what it's worth I think the price is very fair and I chipped in to support the initiative using my "spam" email. It would be really great if you could do a write-up after a while with some numbers regarding the comments above.
I assume (but IANAL) that there may be some legal liability or at least ethical risks to account for if you were doing this but I would be willing to pay more for a reliable summarized service (i.e. not an off the shelf LLM interpretation) that I can trust to notify me of potentially relevant changes of comparable quality to the HN hive-mind with the advantage of being able to add the services I personally use that the collective here may not.
For small changes, I'd rather read the diff. But occasionally, like item (10), it displays an understanding of the content and the summary is pretty useful. With guided prompts I bet you could make it much more useful, and even answer specific questions that align with folks' use cases for monitoring.
[1] https://chat.openai.com/share/c6ec81aa-de8c-49e3-b132-239136...
Yes, precisely. But also, do so as a group, and say why they're doing so.
> If the change is that bad, they’ll probably hear about it anyway.
People hear about such changes because someone notices and brings it up and raises a stink about it.
For a service like this, one model that may make sense is to remind the user that their primary recourse is to stop using the service, but that for egregious ToS changes (known types of which you can flag), they may want to sign on to an awareness/action campaign whose premise is "we're not going to use this service anymore, here's why, change the term and we come back, otherwise we're in the market for a new service without that term".
Have GitHub run a daily/weekly pull of the site in question. Attempt to add the artifact to the repo. If identical, no action taken. Otherwise, a commit is made with the new content, and you can now trivially diff the changes over time.
[0] https://simonwillison.net/2020/Oct/9/git-scraping/
https://github.com/rtfpessoa/diff2html-cli