not-anymore

About

This is browser plug-in that filters out most important clauses from any list of Terms & Conditions(T&Cs) and also summarizes and visualizes results.

Aim

• It aims to empower web users to make informed decisions online by knowing the tradeoffs mentioned in the Terms of Service.
• The main objective is to eduate the users about what bounds they have agreed to abide by and how their data is being managed by a service.

How does it work?

Scraping Terms & Conditions / Terms of Service document :

• JavaScript and Python are used to scrape the docuement from the website.

Filtering Important Terms :

Dataset creation

• The dataset is created with contribution from the community via a website (inspired by the Common Voice project)
• The dataset is compiled to a suitable format for use by anyone.
• This dataset will be open source too.

Machine Learning model - Training

• A Machine Learning model is trained with a suitable data-set built by the community.
• Bigger and more relevant the data-set, better the Classifier.
• More training = Accurate filtering.

Filtering

• User clicks on the extension icon
• Extension scrapes out the T&C document and feeds it to the trained model.
• The Classifier system picks out a few clauses that require the user's attention the most.
• The resulting few important clauses are displayed in a pop-up.

Summarizing :

Natural Language processing engine

• An NLP engine is trained with the help of existing datasets.
• The engine then summarizes the sections under the document.
• The Summarized content is made available in the form of an API.

Visualization

• The summarized data is visualized with the help of flow diagrams and associativity diagrams.

What browsers will it be available for

• Currently, it will be developed as a firefox add-on.
• Chrome extension to follow quickly as we plan to use the WebExtensions standard.