SignScan

Know What You’re Signing

Inspiration

This idea was inspired by the current issue of how most people blindly agree to the company’s Terms of Service agreement without reading through the contents or understanding what legal implications are embedded or what rights the users are giving up by signing the agreement.

This issue was recently brought to public attention due to a case in October 2023 due to Dr. Kanokporn Tangsuan passed away from an allergic reaction at a restaurant in Disney Springs. Her husband tried to file a lawsuit against Disney. The family was blocked from pursuing a lawsuit because he had agreed to the Disney+ and Disney World ticket Terms of Service agreement years before the incident occurred. Within the agreement, the TOS contained a mandatory arbitration clause, which stated that any legal disputes related to Disney must be settled through arbitration instead of through court. This Disney case revealed the potential dangers of agreeing to TOS agreements without understanding the contents, as they can often contain predatory clauses and cause users to unknowingly give up certain legal rights. Following public backlash, Disney eventually waived the arbitration claim, highlighting the hidden risks in TOS agreements.

This inspired us to create SignScan as a way to help inform users of the legal implications that occur when signing any TOS agreement.

What it does

SignScan is a Chrome extension that scans Terms of Service pages and instantly summarizes their key points. It informs users of potential risks such as waiving legal rights, predatory clauses, and data selling policies. SignScan also displays an overall risk level based on the severity of the Terms and Conditions. The extension presents this summarized information in a clean and easy-to-read format in a new browser tab.

Risk Levels:

High Risk: The Terms include serious concerns such as waiving legal rights, predatory clauses, and significantly limiting the ability to pursue legal action.

Medium Risk: The Terms include moderate concerns such as the selling of personal data, informal dispute resolution requirements, or vague and unclear details about user rights.

Low Risk: The Terms contain minimal concerns and do not appear to significantly impact the user’s legal rights.

How we built it

HTML, CSS, and JavaScript for the Chrome extension framework
OpenAI’s API
Visual Studio Code for development
GitHub for version control
Tested the SignScan Chrome extension on different Terms of Service pages such as Spotify, TikTok, Instagram, etc.

Challenges we ran into

Handling different website structures in how the Terms of Service content was displayed
Fixing formatting issues so that summaries were visually clean and easy to read
Validating the best hardcoded prompt to use with OpenAI for our intended response

One of the biggest challenges that we ran into was dealing with different website structures for Terms of Service pages. Some pages displayed the text directly on the main site while others embedded the content inside iframes or loaded it dynamically. This made it more difficult to consistently capture the Terms of Service content.

Another major challenge that we ran into was ensuring that the AI-generated summaries were visually clean, organized, and easy to read.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Successfully creating a Chrome extension that automatically scans and summarizes the content in Terms of Service pages
Providing an automated risk rating system for terms of service pages to optimize user decision- making.

What we learned

How to build a Chrome extension using Manifest v3
How to connect browser extensions with external APIs (OpenAI)
How to refine prompt engineering for AI to produce reliable and comprehensive outputs