Changewatch

Watch for changes in big tech privacy policies

2 followers

Watch for changes in big tech privacy policies

2 followers

Companies hide behind opaque language and vague updates to their terms and policies. Changewatch lets you see exactly what has changed between versions of a policy in a simple, human-readable way, helping you make better decisions about your data.

Free

Launch tags:Privacy•Legal•Tech

Launch Team

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One needs to be an expert in legalese to understand the changes a company has made to its terms and policies. We often don't read the whole thing as well. Because terms and policies are boring. And companies do change it all the time without the user's knowledge. You are solving a very important issue. Congratulations @alastair_byrne & @flippaweeks on launching Change Watch on Product Hunt! 🚀 Please feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn (www.linkedin.com/in/hemantwarier/). I hope we can add value to each other as makers! 🙌

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4yr ago

Changewatch

Maker

@alastair_byrne @hemantwarier Yes, the language used can be way too complex and also it is easy for them to sneak in significant changes without you noticing. Companies make them boring on purpose so you don't read them. I have reach out on LinkedIn, and have a great week.

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4yr ago

Changewatch

Maker

This project came about because we kept getting emails from companies saying something along the lines of “We’ve updated our terms of use. Click here to see the new version”. This was very annoying, as most of these emails would, at best, include a summary of the changes, but most often not give any indication of what changed, leaving you to hope there’s an archived version you can compare the new version with. We made Changewatch to help people see exactly what’s changed between versions of policies in a simple, human-readable way, so that they can know precisely what changes they’re agreeing to. We’ve started by monitoring things like privacy policies from large tech companies like Google, Apple, Amazon, etc., and over time we’ll expand the number of policies we track. Changewatch currently only accesses the UK versions of policies, but we’re planning to support multiple locales per policy in a future update. Sites like https://tosdr.org/ do a good job of breaking down the meaning of different policies, but don’t solve our problem of knowing that something we had agreed to had changed, but not precisely what had changed. Some companies, like Google, keep archived versions of old policies, and include diffs, but this is by no means the norm, and in those cases Changewatch provides an independent verification of their claims. We experimented with several ways of diffing natural-language text to try and find one that yields an intuitive and readable diff display. We ended up with a two-stage process where we first compare the two pieces of text by paragraph, and then by word. The resulting diff matches nicely with the original text structure, which helps with readability and comparison with the original document. We faced several challenges with the scraping, some of which aren’t solved yet. For instance, Facebook (seemingly) randomly serves our scraper either the UK or the EU version of their privacy policy, even though we’re accessing it via a UK-based proxy. This results in policy revisions being created where the only changes are the differences between the UK and EU versions of the policy. Hence why Changewatch doesn’t currently track Facebook’s privacy policy. Thanks for reading. We would love to hear your comments, feedback and suggestions.

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4yr ago

Archbee

Great concept. Definitely better than reading the updated ToS each time. Good luck!

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4yr ago

Changewatch

Maker

@dragos_bulugean Thank you for the lovely comments, and glad that you found Changewatch useful. Have an epic day 😀

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4yr ago

So cool!

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4yr ago

Changewatch

Maker

@chervon_al Thank you for your comment and glad you like what we have created 😀 Have a epic day!

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4yr ago

Cool and unique idea. All the best!

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4yr ago

Changewatch

Maker

@basharath Thank you for the great comment and liked the idea. Have an epic day!

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4yr ago

Covary

Awesome. Great tool to a legal geek like myself.

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4yr ago

Changewatch

Maker

@elad_bibi_aviv Thank you for the lovely words. As a legal geek, if you would like any new features do let us know, have an amazing week. Thanks

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4yr ago

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