Privacy Policy TLDR

A lightweight, plug-and-play extension that simplifies complex privacy policies and makes users more aware of what they’re agreeing to, without reading any walls of legal text.

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Inspiration

I used to ignore privacy policies when signing up for websites. But after receiving a surge of scam calls and emails, I started wondering how my data was being shared. That motivated me to better understand how companies collect and handle user data.

What it does

Privacy Policy TL;DR is a Chrome extension that automatically extracts and summarizes the most critical parts of a website's privacy policy using AI. It highlights:

  • Risk Level (High/Moderate/Low)
  • What data is collected
  • How data is shared and stored
  • Compliance info (e.g., GDPR, CCPA)

How I built it

  • Frontend: HTML, CSS, JavaScript
  • AI Summarization: Gemini API (free tier)
  • The extension grabs the privacy content from the page, filters it down, and sends it to the API for a concise summary, which is then formatted and displayed in the popup.

Challenges I ran into

  • Extracting only relevant policy content without exceeding token limits.
  • Ensuring the output stays consistent and well-formatted across different websites.
  • Making the UI responsive and user-friendly within the limited popup space.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

  • Built a fully functional Chrome extension from scratch in a short time.
  • Integrated AI (Gemini API) to summarize legal text with clear, structured output.
  • Designed a clean UI with color-coded risk indicators for instant clarity.
  • Implemented token-efficient text filtering to stay within API usage limits.
  • Made privacy policies accessible and understandable for non-technical users.

What I learned

  • How to work with Chrome Extensions and DOM manipulation.
  • Prompt engineering for effective API responses.
  • Token optimization to reduce API usage.
  • Designing minimal, intuitive UIs using CSS.

What's next for Privacy Policy TLDR

  • Improve context-aware text filtering to further reduce input tokens.
  • Add support for more compliance types (like HIPAA, ISO).
  • Allow users to download or save summaries for future reference.
  • Explore mobile/browser support beyond Chrome.
  • Add multilingual support for privacy policies in different regions.

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