Privacy Without Anxiety

Inspiration

Hundreds of college students tapped the big green “Join” button to become members of NameDrop, a new social network. But according to paragraph 2.3.1 of the terms of service, they’d agreed to give NameDrop their future first-born children. Luckily, NameDrop was a fake company and was a social experiment run by two college students, but what are the possibilities if the company acted as an actual scam?

What it does

Our application is designed to scan through the terms and conditions pages of a user-specified website and based on that, it will analyze the T.O.C. and classify and summarize the key information in an easy-to-read format for the user. The application searches for specific key words indicating user's rights or privacy statements, such as the right to use location, pictures, share information with 3rd party companies, etc.

How I built it

We built a website, which has a backend python script running, which is where the main interactions with the user will take place. Currently, the user can copy paste the entire terms and conditions pages for the program to analyze and classify appropriately, but in the future, we want to make it so that the user can just enter in the name of the website and based on that, we will automatically find the necessary information and classify it as well.

Challenges I ran into

While trying to create the backend python script, we tried experimenting with many different softwares such as Django and Flask, however due to the time constraint we had and the complexity of these programs, we decided to add that it would be best if we first get a minimum viable project to function.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

We created a very robust and unique application that tackles an issue that so many of us deal with all around the world. We were able to understand python and quickly and efficiently parse through the data in order to summarize the terms and conditions into smaller crucial sections that the user could read.

What I learned

I learned quite a bit about time management and overshooting ideas as we had a lot of things that we had planned to get done but unfortunately our group was not able to accomplish a lot of what we had set out to do. In addition, I also learned about the Python web development framework Flask and although we were not able to merge our project with Flask in this project, I still learned a lot on how Python can be used within web development. Last but not least, our group also utilized HTML and CSS to create a simple website that would display our project and although once again we were not able to merge it with our main application, I still learned a lot about web development.

What's next for Privacy Without Anxiety

1) Our group would like to merge the Python parsing script into our well designed website. 2) We would like to develop a database in which the common Terms and Conditions are stored as this would allow users to access data even faster. 3) We would like to utilize the TensorFlow API in order to create an A.I model that will learn which words would be deemed as important since right now it only selects sections that contain a specified keyword. 4) We would like to also add web scraping so that the user does not have to copy and paste the terms and conditions. Through web scraping the user would just be able to enter in the URL or even the Company Name