Inspiration
Our inspiration for this project stems from a shared habit of skipping through entire terms of service agreements without actually understanding what we were agreeing to. However, sometimes these conditions may be surprising, such as BeReal claiming ownership of all photos posted on its app for up to 30 years! We wanted to create an app to condense terms of service documents into a concise, easy-to-read summary, as well as inform the user how safe his or her data is on a particular application.
What it does
TOS-ter uses large language models to summarize terms of service documents into just a few important bullet points. It also generates a privacy rating based on the contract's details and historical information about the company to rate how secure the user's data will be.
How we built it
Our app was built using a full MERN stack: we used React Js for our front end, Node and Express to create RESTful APIs, and MongoDB for our database. The UI was first prototyped in Figma, and we also used bootstrap to style some of the pages. We also utilized OpenAi’s gpt-3.5-turbo model as our LLM of choice in order to summarize and analyze the uploaded TOS documents.
Challenges we ran into
One challenge we ran into was the openAPI call taking too long. We couldn’t figure out how to fix this, and every time a user searched for a company, it would always take around 20 seconds to fetch the result. To reduce this time, we instead circumvented this issue by creating a database to store results - when this company was searched again, the results could be returned in less than a second. Another technical challenge we ran into was resolving Github conflicts; with over 170 commits in just a few days, managing different branches of the repository became quite an arduous task.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Almost all the members of our team did not have a lot of experience working with React, and no one had any backend experience prior to this hackathon, so we were elated when we finally completed our full-stack web app. We’re also proud of our name TOS-ter and our themed UI design!
What we learned
This hackathon was an amazing learning experience for all of us. We learned how to develop a full-stack application, seamlessly connecting the frontend to the backend, as well as how to effectively utilize async functions while handling API requests. Most importantly, we practiced communicating and working together as a team!
What's next for TOS-ter
The next step we were planning to take is to add our application to a Chrome extension where our application could scan the webpage instead of having the user upload the contract. In addition to this, we noticed that during testing, some of the API responses were not fully accurate, and we definitely plan on generating training data to fine-tune our model to TOS contracts in order to improve summarization accuracy.
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