
Ask HN: Any “Git diff”-like service but for when terms of conditions changes? - panchicore3
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?
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dockers22
I'm a co-founder of [https://termscout.com](https://termscout.com) and our
TermAlerts service does exactly what you are looking for.

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. :)

~~~
omarhaneef
You know what would be a great marketing 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.)

~~~
andrewnc
I made and sold a company that did just this

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spacepinball
Amazing

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ratonofx
There is [https://tosback.org/](https://tosback.org/) or
[https://www.docracy.com/tos/changes](https://www.docracy.com/tos/changes) for
most popular services

Or

You can build your own
[https://github.com/pde/tosback2-data](https://github.com/pde/tosback2-data)

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omneity
[https://monitoro.xyz](https://monitoro.xyz) does exactly this (assuming you
use it with IFTTT to send updates to your favorite endpoint).

Disclaimer: I'm the author, and I'm happy to answer questions.

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christefano
Follow That Page has a good diff by email service for pages that change.

[https://www.followthatpage.com](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.

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lcall
There are some interesting suggestions here.

Another (free) is [https://tosdr.org](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](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?)

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alexsmolen
This is what [https://tosback.org/](https://tosback.org/) does, I believe.

~~~
sashk
Unfortunately there is too much noise for some TOS.

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colejohnson66
VisualPing? [https://visualping.io/](https://visualping.io/)

~~~
torvald
I made a simple script, as I prefer plain text emails.
[https://torvald.no/web-change-detection.html](https://torvald.no/web-change-
detection.html)

~~~
sosuke
Thanks for sharing! I like the idea of getting the diff in my email
notification.

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jmfayard
Not directly what you ask, but "Terms of Service didn't read" is great

[https://tosdr.org/#](https://tosdr.org/#)

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Dyaz17
You can also use [https://www.guardscript.com](https://www.guardscript.com)
that does this for free and send you a diff in your email.

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laurynas-s
I am the founder of [https://pagecrawl.io](https://pagecrawl.io) and this is
exactly what can you do with the service.

I have been considering releasing a product only for tracking ToS only but
haven't managed to release it yet.

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imduffy15
[https://scrapinghub.com/autoextract](https://scrapinghub.com/autoextract) may
help you with this, it will provide the article in a structured form which you
can then diff.

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z3t4
Wayback machine and text diff.

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yayitswei
You could try Diffbot.

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damasko
vimdiff

