TL-DR

Submitting to the general track & social impact

Inspiration

Be honest: when was the last time you’ve actually read the terms and conditions of an app, website, extension, or product? According to a 2017 Deloitte survey, 91% of consumers agreed to the terms and conditions of mobile app and service providers without reading them; this percentage increases to 97% for people aged 18-34. These terms and conditions aren’t easy to digest; they’re long, extensively detailed, and full of ambiguous language. This has increasingly become a bigger issue as corporations track almost every aspect of consumers’ lives— everything from web searches to the content of texts.

What it does

TL-DR is a solution intended to help consumers easily understand what they are consenting to when they agree to terms and conditions. The solution is two-pronged:

Google Chrome Extension.
Website Visualization

Google Chrome Extension

Description/ Overview

This Chrome Extension provides users with highlights of the terms and conditions of websites that are known to collect data. This information is dynamically presented based on the website that the user is currently on. The extension will provide this information when people are considering signing up for a service and when they are using the service.

Features

When you click on the extension, a sleek and simple interface that is easy to read and navigate appears as a small tab on the right of your screen. This tab contains two easy to toggle between options: Terms Made Easy and Resources. The Terms Made Easy option contains viewer-friendly bullet points about important items from the terms and conditions related to that website. The Resources option contains links to additional information and further readings.

Visualization

Description/ Overview

The visualization is for consumers to understand exactly how much information is being collected on them and what the information might be being used for. We used data from Netflix and Instagram. We have laid out how we collected the information and how we were able to come up with these visuals in a guide so that users are able to follow along if they'd like to replicate the result with their own data.

What's next for TL-DR

To make data privacy a reality, TL-DR aims to continue to build the websites that the chrome extension has information for. This will allow users to be aware of what they are consenting to on every service that they use or are considering using. Additionally, we hope to expand the visualization tool to be more easily accessible by making the code open source or making the page dynamic to allow users to upload their own data for the website to visualize.