weekly news #22: Terms-of-Service; Didn't Read ("ToS;DR")

[Michiel de Jong]

Hi!

This week I worked from CCC-camp, which was a unique opportunity to talk about how online freedom with some of the world's opinion leaders on the subject. My conclusions:

- we need a way for end-users to know which services are good, and which ones are bad. the closest thing that exists right now is drumbeat privacy icons: http://disconnect.me/db/

- icons are probably even too complicated. i propose to do something more like washing machine eco labels: http://www.washerhelp.co.uk/topics/eco-energy-labels.html 

- to get to the "class A" .. "class G" classification, the icons would still be the underlying measure. But since we no longer need to display them to non-power user, they can be a more complete list. After talking to various people at CCC camp, I came up with the following set of attributes: https://github.com/michiel-unhosted/ToS-DR/blob/master/app/criteria.js

- of the drumbeat icons at http://disconnect.me/db/icons the top row correspond to 'OPP'. The bottom left to 'GOV', and the bottom middle/right to 'DEL'. I added 'BY', 'PRIV', 'DL' and 'EQ' after analyzing the Dropbox and Facebook ToS. Yuwei, Jan, and two more contributors came up with 'CEN', 'END', 'ANON', and 'DIST'. Of the resulting set of 11 attributes, 4 are boolean (green/red) and 7 have a half-OK value, so they are green/orange/red).

- we should make an app, a bit like Universal Subtitles, that allows people to quote sentences from ToS of services, and mark them as red, green or orange in one of those 11 attributes.

- the app should also have a section where you vote attributes up and down, to increase or decrease their influence on the class-rating

- someone offered to help write this web app. We'll be using backbone.js, with a syncStorage backend.

- once we have a website that displays ToS;DR ratings for websites, it makes sense to create a browser plugin that warns you when you're visiting a website that is not at least, say, ToS;DR-class C. Also, as someone suggested, a plugin could highlight things on the ToS page of websites, helping you to read them whenever you run into them.

Today is also the last day to become a Crowd Angel for our project: http://unhosted.org/

ToS;DR was a bit of a side-step week. It's not part of what we're trying to achieve with the project, but it's a necessary tool, that didn't exist. Once we have a way to explain to end-users that some services are better than others, we can add "accepts unhosted accounts" to the attributes. 

9 September will be our project's first birthday, and the time until then I want to dedicate to finishing and documenting things, and publish a consistent snapshot of the current status of everything we have developed during the first year.

To celebrate this, I can reveal that there has been some discussion of a pilgrimage to Unhošť that weekend. As we discovered by accident, this happens to be a small village in the Středočeský Kraj region (Central Bohemia). It should be quite easy to get there from Berlin, because it's not very far from Prague. If this goes through, then we can send your donation T-shirts with an Unhošť post stamp on the envelope. :) Not promising anything yet though, I'm trying to get in touch with the town mayor first.

Cheers!

Michiel

[Michiel de Jong]

PS, some more contribution credits: the people who suggested adding 'ANON' and who offered to help write the app are Malvin and Markus, respectively. The 'END' attribute was suggested by an unidentified PiratePad editor. Thanks a lot, everybody!