Simple Terms | Devpost

Example usage on Apple's terms and conditions
Example usage on DuckDuckGo's terms of service
Example usage on Microsoft's services agreement

Inspiration

Did you know that Microsoft’s service agreement is over 17,000 words long, meaning it takes over an hour to read? We all know that it's impractical to read the terms of service for every single product you use. But are you unknowingly accepting terms that take away your privacy to a much greater extent than you ever realized?

What it does

In Simple Terms™ (pun intended), our Chrome extension summarizes terms and conditions, privacy policies, and service agreements, presenting only the most concerning details in an easily digestible format.

It also provides a rating displayed as a banner to show a quick indicator as to the severity of the terms, and a metric to show how much time you save from not reading the whole document!

How we made it

We used OpenAI’s gpt-3.5 API to generate the summaries, and used TypeScript, React, and Tailwind CSS for the Chrome extension itself.

Challenges we ran into

One significant challenge was the length of some of these documents. As mentioned earlier, Microsoft’s service agreement is over 17,000 words long which means we can’t pass the whole thing into the OpenAI API at once.

We solved this by splitting long documents into multiple segments and making an API call for each segment. However, doing that could take over 30 seconds to generate a summary! We employed several techniques to reduce the time it takes as much as possible, including making requests in parallel, prompt optimization, and preloading. Now even the longest documents are summarized in seconds!

What we learned

You "sign away moral rights" by using Reddit, Spotify, Snapchat, and many other services.
YouTube can view your browser history.
PayPal still tracks you even if you opt out from tracking.
Content you post to Apple Services may be edited by the service for any reason.
... And many more.

We were shocked by just how intrusive some of the privacy policies are for services we use every day. That being said, we are thrilled to have created a tool that works so well and is able to help uncover conditions buried in policies people rarely take the time to read!

On the technical side, we learned a ton about the OpenAI API, as it was the first time anyone on our team used it. We collectively spent many hours optimizing the prompts used, and we put a lot of effort into figuring out how to get good results in within just a few seconds!

What's next

In the future, we hope to get the extension approved so that it can be released on the Chrome Web Store!

We also want to add a small feature where the extension icon changes to provide useful information. For example, the icon would be greyed out when you are not on a valid page, and it would change to reflect results after finishing preloading (a green check mark, an orange exclamation point, or a red X mark depending on the rating).