TERMinator

The Origin of Term-inator

I was at Sankofa one morning, honestly just complaining. About AI, about tech, about how a tool this powerful keeps getting used against the people it was supposed to help.

A Howard Law graduate overheard me and pulled up a chair. He had been researching something that confirmed exactly what I was frustrated about: tech companies don't write confusing Terms of Service by accident. It is intentional. Consumer confusion is a feature, not a bug, and the communities least equipped to navigate legal language are the ones who pay the highest price for it.

That conversation planted the seed for Term-inator.

What We Built

A team of Computer Information Systems students built a web application that allows users to ask plain-language questions about privacy policies and receive clear, cited answers in seconds. Not summaries. Not legal disclaimers. Actual answers, grounded in the source document, in language anyone can understand.

Ask "Does Spotify sell my data?" and find out. No law degree required.

How We Built It

The frontend was built in Lovable. The backend is Python, orchestrating calls between the Claude API and our database. We also developed a Chrome Extension that allows users to analyze the privacy policy of any site they are actively visiting, directly in the browser.

What We Learned

The technical challenges we navigated. What stayed with us was the broader implication: people have rights they are unaware of, and that ignorance is being exploited. Term-inator is our attempt to close that gap.