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ToS;DR Association

Terms of Service Ratings

Terms of Service Ratings is an initiative that rates and labels website terms and privacy policies to help inform consumers of their rights.

Location

Multiple Locations

Overview

Terms of service agreements are standard methods for businesses online to give notice and obtain consent from users that they have permission to legally handle and collect personal data. But some of the most popular online services have terms of service agreements over 10,000 words long with complex legalese that discourage reading and reduce comprehensibility. Terms of Service, Didn’t Read (ToS;DR) was founded in 2012 to fix the “biggest lie” on the internet, “I have read and agree to the Terms of Service.”

ToS;DR’s Terms of Service Ratings rate and label website terms & privacy policies from very good, Class A, to very bad, Class E. The project relies on a group of volunteers to (1) identify specific phrases from terms of service that impact users, (2) simplify the language, (3) label those phrases into green, orange, red, and gray marks, and (4) combine those marks to create a rating. Through the Terms of Serving Ratings, ToS;DR hopes to educate users on their digital rights online.

The name ToS;DR is inspired by the internet acronym TL;DR which stands for “Too Long; Didn’t Read.” TL;DR is frequently used in blogs and emails when summarizing a very long block of text.

Research demonstrates that most users don’t read terms of service and might not understand them even if they did. Research demonstrates that most users don’t read terms of service and might not understand them even if they did.


The Challenge

A 2008 study by Carnegie Mellon researchers found that the average internet user encounters almost 1,500 privacy policies a year, each about 2,500 words in length.1 Further research demonstrates that users don’t read terms and might not understand them even if they did.2 Users may misinterpret their purpose, assuming that the agreements offer a level of data protection, when they do not guarantee user privacy.

It is clear that even if users would like to understand the terms before using a service online, they are too long to read and too complicated to understand. To create a more transparent process between businesses and users, terms of service need to be simplified and shared with current and potential users.

Through the Terms of Serving Ratings, ToS;DR hopes to educate users on their digital rights. Through the Terms of Serving Ratings, ToS;DR hopes to educate users on their digital rights.


About the Intervention

ToS;DR established a community where volunteers worldwide can help identify and review terms of services. Terms of Service Ratings are open-source and maintained through their online forum. To start a ratings process, desired terms of service agreements are uploaded to their database. Volunteers review terms using a computer program that automatically searches documents on the Web. Reviewers then highlight specific phrases before attributing a score, ranging from green (good), orange (bad), red (blocker), and gray (neutral). Once an individual terms of service has enough scores, the score is averaged and assigned a grade from A, the best terms of services, to E, a terms of service which raises serious concerns.

For example, phrases from terms indicating that data will be stored even if a user did not interact with the service will be classified with a red (blocker) score. In contrast, phrases indicating that the service provides a complaint mechanism for the improper handling of personal data will be given a green (good) score.


Impact & Future Plans

ToS;DR has published and reviewed the terms of hundreds of services, including Facebook, Google, Reddit, Twitter, and more. The Terms of Service Ratings are reflected on their browser extensions which users can download to be informed of a service’s grade before accepting the term. Terms of Service Ratings are also integrated with DuckDuckGo’s Privacy Essentials browser extension.

The Terms of Service Ratings project has raised awareness about problems with notice and consent models like terms of services online. The terms are typically offered as “take it or leave it.” Declining the terms frequently results in being denied the product or service. The Terms of Service Ratings project has also affected policy change in Europe, with the General Data Protection Directive (GDPR) including a provision that asks the European Commission to come up with standards to simplify the information in privacy policies.

Because terms of services are updated frequently, future plans include creating an automated document annotator and reviewer. ToS;DR is also looking to grow the community of reviewers and raise further awareness about problems associated with terms of services.


  1. ¹ Aleecia M McDonald and Lorrie Faith Cranor, “The Cost of Reading Privacy Policies,” I/S: A Journal of Law and Policy for the Information Society, no. Privacy Year in Review (n.d.): 22. 

  2. ² Craig Wigginton, Mike Curran, and Terrence Karner, “2017 Global Mobile Consumer Survey: US Edition” (Deloitte, 2017).