progress on ToS;DR (a crowd-reading hub for Terms-of-Service)

[Michiel de Jong]

Hi!

I'm setting up this initiative which will help us distinguish good websites from evil websites. The idea is that everybody chooses a website (either a good one ore an evil one), takes their current terms of service, and reads them.

As you read them, you copy it into a new html document and add classes to spans, which form tags, indicating what that sentence(s) mean(s).

I've done Dropbox so far, you can use it as an example:

https://github.com/michiel-unhosted/ToS-DR/blob/master/sites/dropbox.html

Right now i'm doing Facebook. Please chip in by choosing a website, either good or bad, and tagging each span of a few sentences with a class attribute that more or less indicates what those sentences state. Hopefully, we'll see that tags coincide more and more often, and we arrive to a set of, say, 100 things that different website ToS tend to state.

Examples of websites that would be interesting:

hotmail, google, duckduckgo, twitter, identica, flickr, amazon, e-bay, ...

Then we'll go to phase two, which is rating. I'm planning a workshop here at CCC camp (on Saturday, in the DataVillage), in which we'll go through the list and do a show of hands to define which ones are really bad and which ones are really good.

With that information, we'll give points to each website, and then we'll translate those points into a 0- to 5-star rating. An optional fourth phase would be a firefox plugin that warns you if you're on a website that's got a ToS;DR rating of less than, say, two stars, and that turns green, or happy or whatever, when you're on a site with a ToS;DR rating of at least 4.

The approach of crowd-reading (tagging snippets, then rating those tags), is something i'm proposing after various discussions i had with people here at CCC camp, some of them active members of eff and other activist groups. It's an alternative to providing icons like Laurie Cranor and Aza Raskin have proposed. I think a rating is easier for non-power user. A power-user who is interested specifically in a certain type or aspect of freedom, could use custom weights instead of default weights, and that way still get to a threshold-rating of what is good, what is bad, and what is ugly. Comments about this general approach also very welcome!

The relation of this to Unhosted is, apart from its direct impact on user freedom on the web, that such a rating and labeling of good vs. bad websites doesn't really exist currently, and it's a pre-condition for creating conscious web users. Once these exist, we can add "admits unhosted accounts" as a positive trait for a website, without making that a biased pointer. A website might admit unhosted accounts, but still be evil in other ways. Also, users will have to choose /where/ they want to have their unhosted account. A good way to help them with that, is to provide them with crowd-voted ToS;DR ratings of these storage providers. The user can then make a comparison between usability, price, and ToS;DR rating. Otherwise, many users might not understand why they should use e.g. allmydata.org instead of dropbox.com for their storage provider.

Cheers,

Michiel

[pir...@gmail.com]

Really interesting idea, i like it :-) Later the classes can be used
to show badges besides the star rating, isn't it?

2011/8/11 Michiel de Jong <mic...@unhosted.org>:

--
"Si quieres viajar alrededor del mundo y ser invitado a hablar en un
monton de sitios diferentes, simplemente escribe un sistema operativo
Unix."
– Linus Tordvals, creador del sistema operativo Linux

[David Kettler]

Also check out http://disconnect.me/db/ which grew out of the Mozilla Privacy Icons Working Group. It'd be great if efforts could be combined, as human-readable ToS and Privacy Policies would be a big win for the web. I'll be forwarding comments about granular vs. binary ratings to the drumbeat-pr...@lists.mozilla.org to affect our steps moving forward.

--David Kettler

[Michiel de Jong]

oh, cool! is disconnect.me/db currently still a mock up? it looks like the data is not really there if you click on one of the listed sites, and if you click 'home', there's no way to go back there. maybe i'm doing something wrong. :) i subscribed to your mailing list as well.

yes, we should definitely do this together. i use the terms ToS and privacy policy more or less interchangeably. is it correct to say that ToS is a superset of privacy policy? i think a verdict about 'good' and 'bad' websites should always be a combination of both.

i don't have so much of an opinion about binary vs. granular, but i do think we should define  a single final verdict, and hide the details behind that. my inspiration for this is http://www.washerhelp.co.uk/topics/eco-energy-labels.html - you get a global rating of a 'class A' or 'class B' washing machine, and below (for washing machine 'power users') there are the details of in which category it scores higher or lower.

in any case, the choice of how to display the verdict is independent of the work of obtaining the database with attributes about all major websites. different verdicts can be formulated based on the same database of attributes.

have you collected any data yet? as i said, maybe i'm using disconnect.me/db in the wrong way, and that's why i don't see it displaying the data.

Cheers!

Michiel

[Michiel de Jong]

On Thu, Aug 11, 2011 at 11:09 PM, Michiel de Jong <mic...@unhosted.org> wrote:

oh, cool! is disconnect.me/db currently still a mock up? it looks like the data is not really there if you click on one of the listed sites, and if you click 'home', there's no way to go back there. maybe i'm doing something wrong. :)

ok sorry, i've realised my mistake now - there are 200 sites on there, and of these 38 have been iconified. i was trying with ones that hadn't been iconified yet, and it all showed up grey, that's why i was confused, sorry.

Cheers!

Michiel