Services have terms that can change over time. Open Terms Archive enables users rights advocates, regulatory bodies and any interested citizen to follow the changes to these terms by being notified whenever a new version is published, and exploring their entire history.
Les services ont des conditions générales qui évoluent dans le temps. Open Terms Archive permet aux défenseurs des droits des utilisateurs, aux régulateurs et à toute personne intéressée de suivre les évolutions de ces conditions générales en étant notifiée à chaque publication d'une nouvelle version, et en explorant leur historique.
Note: Words in bold are business domain names.
Services are declared within Open Terms Archive with a declaration file listing all the documents that, together, constitute the terms under which this service can be used. These documents all have a type, such as “terms and conditions”, “privacy policy”, “developer agreement”…
In order to track their changes, documents are periodically obtained by fetching a web location and selecting content within the web page to remove the noise (ads, navigation menu, login fields…). Beyond selecting a subset of a page, some documents have additional noise (hashes in links, CSRF tokens…) that would be false positives for changes. Open Terms Archive thus supports specific filters for each document.
However, the shape of that noise can change over time. In order to recover in case of information loss during the noise filtering step, a snapshot is recorded every time there is a change. After the noise is filtered out from the snapshot, if there are changes in the resulting document, a new version of the document is recorded.
Anyone can run their own private instance and track changes on their own. However, we also publish each version on a public instance that makes it easy to explore the entire history and enables notifying over email whenever a new version is recorded. Users can subscribe to notifications.
Note: For now, when multiple versions coexist, terms are only tracked in their English version and for the European jurisdiction.
We offer a public database of versions recorded each time there is a change in the terms of service and other contractual documents of tracked services: OpenTermsArchive-versions.
From the repository homepage OpenTermsArchive-versions, open the folder of the service of your choice (e.g. WhatsApp).
You will see the set of documents tracked for that service, now click on the document of your choice (e.g. WhatsApp's Privacy Policy). The latest version (updated hourly) will be displayed.
To view the history of changes made to this document, click on History at the top right of the document (for our previous example). The changes are ordered by date, with the latest first.
Click on a change to see what it consists of (for example this one). There are two types of display you can choose from the icons in the gray bar above the document.
- The first one, named source diff (button with chevrons) allows you to display the old version and the new one side by side (for our example). This display has the merit of explicitly showing all additions and deletions.
- The second one, named rich diff (button with a document icon) allows you to unify all the changes in a single document (for our example). The red color shows deleted elements, the yellow color shows modified paragraphs, and the green color shows added elements. Be careful, this display does not show some changes such as hyperlinks and text style's changes.
- For long documents, unchanged paragraphs will not be displayed by default. You can manually make them appear by clicking on the small arrows just above or just below the displayed paragraphs.
- You can use the History button anywhere in the repository OpenTermsArchive-versions, which will then display the history of changes made to all documents in the folder where you are (including sub-folders).
You can go on the official front website opentermsarchive.org. From there, you can select a service and then the corresponding document type. After you enter your email and click on subscribe, we will add your email to the correspondning mailing list in SendInBlue and will not store your email anywhere else. Then, everytime a modification is found on the correspondning document, we will send you an email.
You can unsubscribe at any moment by clicking on the unsubscribe link at the bottom of the received email.
You can subscribe to receive an email whenever a document is updated in the database.
Beware, you are likely to receive a large amount of notifications! You can unsubscribe by replying to any email you will receive.
You can receive notification for a specific service or document by subscribing to RSS feeds.
An RSS feed is a type of web page that contains information about the latest content published by a website, such as the date of publication and the address where you can view it. When this resource is updated, a feed reader app automatically notifies you and you can see the update.
To find out the address of the RSS feed you want to subscribe to:
- Navigate to the page with the history of changes you are interested in. In the WhatsApp example above, this would be this page.
- Copy the address of that page from your browser’s address bar. In the WhatsApp example, this would be
https://github.com/ambanum/OpenTermsArchive-versions/commits/master/WhatsApp/Privacy%20Policy.md. - Append
.atomat the end of this address. In the WhatsApp example, this would becomehttps://github.com/ambanum/OpenTermsArchive-versions/commits/master/WhatsApp/Privacy%20Policy.md.atom. - Subscribe your RSS feed reader to the resulting address.
| Updated for | URL |
|---|---|
| all services and documents | https://github.com/ambanum/OpenTermsArchive-versions/commits.atom |
| all the documents of a service | Replace $serviceId with the service ID:https://github.com/ambanum/OpenTermsArchive-versions/commits/master/$serviceId.atom. |
| un document spécifique d'un service | Replace $serviceId with the service ID and $documentType with the document type:https://github.com/ambanum/OpenTermsArchive-versions/commits/master/$serviceId/$documentType.md.atom |
For example:
- To receive all updates of
Facebookdocuments, the URL ishttps://github.com/ambanum/OpenTermsArchive-versions/commits/master/Facebook.atom. - To receive all updates of the
Privacy PolicyfromGoogle, the URL ishttps://github.com/ambanum/OpenTermsArchive-versions/commits/master/Google/Privacy%20Policy.md.atom.
In order to not receive emails of updated services anymore, two links are included in every email received:
- one to stop receiving all emails from bot@opentermsarchive.org
- one to stop receiving emails of a particular document
The latter consists in sending an email to contact@opentermsarchive.org to be manually removed from the corresponding list.
See CONTRIBUTING.
See the CONTRIBUTING of repository OpenTermsArchive/services-all.
Windows Support: This module can run locally on Windows systems.
This module is built with Node. You will need to install Node >= v14.x to run it.
Clone the repository and install dependencies:
git clone https://github.com/ambanum/OpenTermsArchive.git
cd OpenTermsArchive
npm installClone services declarations at the same level as the OpenTermsArchive directory:
cd ..
git clone https://github.com/OpenTermsArchive/services-all.gitThe default configuration can be read and changed in config/default.json.
{
"services": {
"declarationsPath": "Directory containing services declarations and associated filters.",
"documentTypesPath": "File containing document types."
},
"recorder": {
"versions": {
"storage": {
"<storage-adapter>": "Object. Storage adapter configuration. See below."
}
},
"snapshots": {
"storage": {
"<storage-adapter>": "Object. Storage adapter configuration. See below."
}
}
},
"fetcher": {
"waitForElementsTimeout": "Maximum time (in milliseconds) to wait for elements to be present in the page when fetching document in a headless browser"
},
"notifier": { // Notify specified mailing lists when new versions are recorded
"sendInBlue": { // SendInBlue API Key is defined in environment variables, see see the “Environment variables” section below
"administratorsListId": "SendInBlue contacts list ID of administrators",
"updatesListId": "SendInBlue contacts list ID of persons to notify on document updates",
"updateTemplateId": "SendInBlue email template ID used for updates notifications"
}
},
"logger": { // Logging mechanism to be notified upon error
"smtp": {
"host": "SMTP server hostname",
"username": "User for server authentication" // Password for server authentication is defined in environment variables, see the “Environment variables” section below
},
"sendMailOnError": { // Can be set to `false` if you do not want to send email on error
"to": "The address to send the email to in case of an error",
"from": "The address from which to send the email",
"sendWarnings": "Boolean. Set to true to also send email in case of warning",
}
},
"tracker": { // Tracking mechanism to create GitHub issues when document content is inaccessible
"githubIssues": {
"repository": "GitHub repository where to create isssues",
"label": "GitHub issues label to attach to a newly created issue. This specific label has to exist in the repository"
}
},
"dataset": { // Release mechanism to create dataset periodically
"publish": "Boolean. Set to true to enable dataset creation"
}
}The default configuration is merged with (and overridden by) environment-specific configuration that can be specified at startup with the NODE_ENV environment variable.
If you want to change your local configuration, we suggest you create a config/development.json file with overridden values.
An example of a production configuration file can be found in config/production.json.
Two storage adapters are currently supported: Git and MongoDB. Each one can be used independently for versions and snapshots.
{
…
"storage": {
"git": {
"path": "Versions database directory path, relative to the root of this project",
"publish": "Boolean. Set to true to push changes to the origin of the cloned repository at the end of every run. Recommended for production only.",
"prefixMessageToSnapshotId": "Text. Prefix used to explicit where to find the referenced snapshot id. Only useful for versions",
"author": {
"name": "Name to which changes in tracked documents will be credited",
"email": "Email to which changes in tracked documents will be credited"
}
}
}
…
}{
…
"storage": {
"mongo": {
"connectionURI": "URI for defining connection to the MongoDB instance. See https://docs.mongodb.com/manual/reference/connection-string/",
"database": "Database name",
"collection": "Collection name"
}
}
…
}Environment variables can be provided in a .env file at the root of the repository. See .env.example for an example of such a file.
SMTP_PASSWORD: a password for email server authentication, in order to send email notificationsSENDINBLUE_API_KEY: a SendInBlue API key, in order to send email notificationsGITHUB_TOKEN: a token with repository privileges to access to the GitHub API
If your infrastructure requires using an outgoing HTTP/HTTPS proxy to access Internet, you can provide it through the HTTP_PROXY and HTTPS_PROXY environment variable.
To get the latest versions of all services' terms:
npm start
The latest version of a document will be available in /data/versions/$service_provider_name/$document_type.md.
To hourly update documents:
npm run start:scheduler
To get the latest version of a specific service's terms:
npm start $service_id
The service ID is the case sensitive name of the service declaration file without the extension. For example, for
Twitter.json, the service ID is
See Ops Readme.
See export script Readme.
The code for this software is distributed under the European Union Public Licence (EUPL) v1.2. Contact the author if you have any specific need or question regarding licensing.