Rate My TOS

An automatic TOS policy reviewer, Rate My TOS scans and reports any suspicious policies you click "agree" to when creating accounts on any platform.

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Inspiration

We aim to stay informed about data and privacy exploits by major companies, especially legal clauses that shield them from accountability. Inspired by reports of a tech company quietly adding a clause to its user agreement to avoid responsibility for harm, we want to help protect users from blindly signing the terms of service agreements.

What it does

This is a Chrome extension that automatically lets you know about any TOS / privacy policy loopholes and red flags that may be exploitative of your data.

How we built it

We used a React framework called Plasmo, and created an API through Django. This then calls Python functions to use BeautifulSoup / Selenium to scrape the terms of service and privacy policy. This then uses Gemini 1.5 Flash to generate a report on the website’s policies, giving a score on its policies.

Challenges we ran into

The Django API was difficult to set up as debugging was different on a Chrome extension from a typical web app.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We never had experience with building a Chrome extension, so learning to code and debug it through an unfamiliar framework involved a steep learning curve. However, we are very satisfied with our project, as it is very close to being a complete product that could be released to the Chrome Webstore.

What we learned

We learned a lot about the Plasmo framework, and how to properly create Chrome extensions. Furthermore, scraping the web page for policies proved to take much more time than expected.

What's next for Rate My TOS

We could utilize a database to store queries to save time on future policy evaluations.. We could also add a hub page to show recent changes to the policy of commonly visited websites.

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