The Fine Print

Inspiration

Millions of people sign privacy policies, terms of services, insurance, leases and many other documents every day. But only a very small number of them have the time and expertise to read these lengthy agreements which contain arbitration, waivers, hidden fees and other serious clauses. We wanted to find a way to help people become more aware and proactive about their personal privacy and rights.

What it does

The Fine Print makes it ridiculously easy to get AI assisted summaries of lengthy legal documents. We do this via our extension, which automagically scans the website for policy related links. Alternatively, you can simply drag and drop an image or pdf into our user friendly website.

How we built it

At its core is a Flask based backend API that ingests pdf/image/text as input and queries the gpt-3.5 turbo model for a parsing and generating important insights. Web users can use a convenient extension (currently available for Firefox) or the Fine Print website for quick access.

Challenges we ran into

A feature we really really wanted in The Fine Print was the ability to scan link content without the user having to render it. We soon discovered that a large number of websites were client side rendered, meaning they did not have HTML for us to parse as it was generated by JavaScript on their browser. As a workaround, we used Puppeteer, a headless browser library to render these pages server side. It turned out to be a truly worthwhile investment because it dramatically improved our extension's ease of use. Other challenges we faced included concurrent requests and caching via MongoDB to reduce the query time.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

It's astonishing how much we were able to design, develop and ship in under 36 hours. We have not only a fully working proof of concept, but we also accomplished all of our major stretch goals. We also did not compromise on user experience, code quality or infrastructure. Finally, the integration of various tools across different domains enabled us to produce a highly modular product.

What we learned

We learned the nuances involved in the integration of different aspects of software development, and working together as a team towards shared goals. We learned to compromise and work through challenges together, using one another for support and guidance.

What's next for The Fine Print

As part of our future plans, we intend to leverage our highly modular API to provide even more ways for our users. We plan to provide extensions for other browsers and build support for more file formats and use cases.

Working on this project helped us realise the tremendous impact and scale of this application, and we're excited for the next chapter of The Fine Print!