Ethiscan

Ethiscan is a Chrome extension designed to help users understand how websites use their personal data by analyzing Terms and Conditions pages.

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Inspiration

In 2024, Disney attempted to dismiss a wrongful death lawsuit, claiming that since the person had signed the terms and conditions and privacy policy for Disney+, they could not sue. We feel that people should be more aware of what they are agreeing too, but many of us don't have the time or patience to read the terms and conditions.

What it does

To combat this issue, we designed a website & browser extension that analyzes the privacy policy before you click agree. Google Gemini is built-in and analyzes the privacy policy to give the user the opportunity to make informed decisions before agreeing to the terms.

How we built it

We built Ethiscan using HTML/CSS/Javascript frontend. Google Gemini AI is on the backend, which is used to analyze privacy policies based on 5 critical points. A. Data Collection Practices B. Data Usage within the company C. Data sharing with 3rd parties D. User Control over their data E. Policy Clarity

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge we have faced is the ethical question of how to define what a "good" privacy policy is. For many applications we use, the features we come to expect often require large amounts of personal data, so the question of when data collection goes beyond improving user experience is still unanswered. Our other challenge was building a browser extension without any prior experience.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Firstly, for both of us, it was our first hackathon. We integrated several new technologies, many of which we have never used. We are proud of our prompt, which is how Google Gemini analyzes privacy policies. We have gotten the prompt so that the AI is consistently giving similar scores when tested on the same privacy policy multiple times.

What we learned

We learned that the simple idea we started with has evolved into a larger ethical question that cannot be answered with an AI prompt. However, we hope that this extension will raise awareness of company practices with people's data.

What's next for Ethiscan

-We hope to improve our prompt to consider the product to which the privacy policy belongs. -Create a website, where if the user wants information on a specific privacy policy, they can enter the URL.

  • When scanning a companies privacy policy, search the web for databreaches

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