Terms of Service; Didn’t Read

If you are like me you may have often thought to yourself; wouldn’t it be nice it would be if someone could go through all the popular social web services and break down the terms and conditions. Maybe they could give them ratings, to make it easier to digest these lengthy and technical documents. Indeed it can be difficult to know who will own your copyright once you upload content, how easy it will be to delete your account and who might be tracking your activity.  Well, today I found out that someone has done exactly that!

Terms of Service; Didn’t Read gives social web services a rating from A – E on how good their terms & privacy policies are. It  pulls out the good and bad aspects of terms and conditions such as; whether you own copyright, if you can delete your account, whether their terms and conditions likely to change. It then lists them helpfully on their website, that includes highlight for services that have not yet been rated. This means that even if they haven’t completed the massive task of rating all the services yet, you can at least get an idea of their pros and cons.

There is also a web-browser plugin so you can get the information when you need it, without having to open up another tab/window. I’ve only had time to look at this fairly briefly but so far I am very impressed. Here is how it works through the plugin: