I'm thinking about creating a browser extension that automatically analyzes Privacy Policies and Terms of Service. The idea is to summarize them and provide a risk score. I have a few questions:
- Would you feel comfortable trusting an automated analysis of legal texts?
- Do you see any potential issues or failures with such a tool?
- What features would make this extension useful instead of just being annoying?
Just looking for some feedback to see if this idea is worth pursuing!
6 Answers
I think someone might be doing this already with ToS;DR. Have you checked them out? They provide summaries and risk evaluations, though it’s mainly for popular websites.
This sounds interesting! But there could be a few challenges. For starters, handling ambiguity and edge cases could be tough—words like "may" or "could" make things tricky for automated scoring. Plus, laws differ by region; a policy might be fine in one area but not in another. You also risk false positives or negatives which could make people distrust the scores if they feel overstated or understated.
Those are fair points! The goal here isn’t to provide legal guarantees but to highlight risk signals. We wouldn't put hard flags on ambiguous language; instead, the scoring would be more about patterns. For jurisdiction, it’d be a high-level overview based on the policy itself. Plus, every score would include the specific clauses it’s based on to help reduce inaccuracies. It’s more about decision support than legal certification.
This feels like an idea a machine would come up with. I can't see many people wanting to use something like this—it seems impractical for the average user.
I think if a judge found 90% of the clauses in these agreements void, it would be a game changer. They're so long and convoluted, nobody sane could be expected to digest them, so I imagine they’d just be seen as useless noise in court.
I don’t think it really works like that, unfortunately.
Honestly, I doubt many average users care enough to find a tool like this useful or even worth any money. Most people just want to get things done online without getting bogged down in legalese.
Honestly, a lot of people skip reading the Terms of Service altogether. Those who do usually have legal teams to help them out. I don’t think there's a big group of folks in the middle who actively analyze these documents.
I appreciate the suggestion! I’ve seen ToS;DR but it doesn’t quite match what I have in mind since it's only covering the bigger sites.