
EFF Launches A 'Terms of Service' Tracker for Facebook, Google, eBay, Etc. - peter123
http://www.eff.org/press/archives/2009/06/03-0
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chime
I knew someone would come along and do this better than me! I started this
exact thing a couple of months ago: <http://termswatch.pbworks.com/>

* Every morning my home PC downloads new TOS/Privacy pages for the following sites: <http://termswatch.pbworks.com/browse/#view=ViewAllPages>

* Then it uploads the plain-text version of all those pages to PBWiki

* PBWiki manages changes to plain-text quite well and does the hardwork of feeds/update-history etc. for me.

But I got busy with work/school/life that I couldn't develop/publicize it
fully. I almost bought tosupdate.org / termswatch.org / toswatch.org but
thought I should wait for someone like EFF to do it right instead. I wasn't
really trying to build a business around it so instead of being disheartened,
I'm glad that someone out there felt the need for the same app.

~~~
alain94040
Congratulations on doing something about it!

Most of us would just have posted a rant on HN once and gone back to sleep :-)

PS: I checked the EFF page. The main criticism is that there is no analysis of
the change.

The next step would be for some EFF lawyer to comment on significant changes.

The step after that would be some sort of crowdsourced voting so that if a
large number of people don't like the change, the rest of the world knows
about it.

~~~
chime
I was going to auto-post to Tumblr about every change and leave the comments
open for users. My idea was that if there was a significant enough change, it
would be picked up by other sites like HN/reddit/Slashdot where more
insightful analysis could be made.

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euroclydon
It would be neat to combine this with some sort of consumer advocacy reporting
service whereby violations of the TOS could be reported.

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trickjarrett
Glad to see this idea launch, I had played around with something similar in
college, I was going to track changes to TOS pages etc but school got busy and
the idea fell off.

I think it's something that is dearly needed to protect consumers since most
TOSs include some sort of "this is likely to change without notice" as a
standard.

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dannyr
On the last startup weekend in SF, somebody pitched an idea on some sort of a
Yelp for EULAs/TOS. Unfortunately, it never launched.

