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.

🇫🇷 Manuel en français.

• How it works
• Exploring the versions history
  • Notes
• Be notified
  • By email
  • By RSS
    • Recap of available RSS feeds
• Analysing the snapshots history
• Contributing
  • Adding a new service
• Using locally
  • Installing
  • Setting up the database
  • Configuring
    • Configuration file
    • Environment variables
      • SMTP_HOST and SMTP_USERNAME
      • HTTP_PROXY and HTTPS_PROXY
      • SENDINBLUE_API_KEY
      • NODE_ENV
  • Running
  • Deploying
• License

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: CGUs-Versions.

From the repository homepage CGUs-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 CGUs-versions, which will then display the history of changes made to all documents in the folder where you are (including sub-folders).

You can subscribe to receive an email whenever a document is updated in the database.

Beware, this service is in beta and you are likely to receive a large amount of notifications! You can unsubscribe by replying to any email you will receive.

To receive updates of specific services or documents by email, you can use RSS notification instructions and set up a third party service such as FeedRabbit to send you an email whenever there is a change.

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:

1. Navigate to the page with the history of changes you are interested in. In the WhatsApp example above, this would be this page.
2. 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.
3. Append .atom at the end of this address. In the WhatsApp example, this would become https://github.com/ambanum/OpenTermsArchive-versions/commits/master/WhatsApp/Privacy%20Policy.md.atom.
4. Subscribe your RSS feed reader to the resulting address.

For example:

• To receive all updates of Facebook documents, the URL is https://github.com/ambanum/OpenTermsArchive-versions/commits/master/Facebook.atom.
• To receive all updates of the Privacy Policy from Google, the URL is https://github.com/ambanum/OpenTermsArchive-versions/commits/master/Google/Privacy%20Policy.md.atom.

We provide a database of snapshots recorded each time there is a change in the terms of service and other contractual documents of tracked services: OpenTermsArchive-Snapshots.

See CONTRIBUTING.

Windows Support: This module can run locally on Windows systems.

This module is built with Node. You will need to install Node to run it.

Clone the repository and install dependencies:

git clone https://github.com/ambanum/OpenTermsArchive.git
cd OpenTermsArchive
npm install

Initialize the database:

npm run setup

The default configuration can be read and changed in config/default.json.

{
  "serviceDeclarationsPath": "Directory containing services declarations and associated filters.",
  "history": {
    "snapshotsPath": "Snapshots database directory path, relative to the root of this project",
    "versionsPath": "Versions database directory path, relative to the root of this project",
    "publish": "Boolean. Set to true to publish changes to the shared, global database. Should be true only in production.",
    "author": {
      "name": "Name to which changes in tracked documents will be credited",
      "email": "Email to which changes in tracked documents will be credited"
    }
  },
  "fetcher": {
    "waitForElementsTimeout": "Maximum time (in milliseconds) to wait for elements to be present in the page when fetching document in a headless browser",
  },
  "notifier": {
    "sendInBlue": {
      "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"
    }
  }
}

The default configuration is merged with (and overridden by) environment-specific configuration that can be specified at startup with the NODE_ENV environment variable.

An example of a production configuration file can be found in config/production.json. It includes the extra configuration for:

• A logging mechanism, to be notified upon error (this requires a valid SMTP configuration, see environment variables below):

{
  "logger": {
    "sendMailOnError": {
      "to": "[email protected]",
      "from": "[email protected]"
    }
  }
}

• Public URLs to the snapshots and versions repositories, used to automate the initial database setup (publicSnapshotsRepository and publicVersionsRepository which are used by npm setup) and for the links in notifications (snapshotsBaseUrl):

{
  "history": {
    "publicSnapshotsRepository": "https://github.com/ambanum/OpenTermsArchive-snapshots.git",
    "publicVersionsRepository": "https://github.com/ambanum/OpenTermsArchive-versions.git",
    "snapshotsBaseUrl": "https://github.com/ambanum/OpenTermsArchive-snapshots/commit/"
  }
}

These 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.

In order to be notified for errors over email, a valid SMTP configuration should be provided through the following environment variables:

• SMTP_HOST for the SMTP server hostname.
• SMTP_USERNAME / SMTP_PASSWORD for the credentials.

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.

In order to use the default SendInBlue-based notification mechanism, a valid API key should be provided through the SENDINBLUE_API_KEY environment variable.

The NODE_ENV environment variable loads additional configuration files.

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 Twitter.

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.