Most people spend very little time thinking about the terms of service that govern life online. The agreement appears in a flash, we affirm that "I agree to the terms of service," and then it's all quickly forgotten.

Until, of course, something goes wrong. Last week, when Mark Zuckerberg appeared before Congress to defend Facebook, more than one senator pointed to the company's terms of service. Could Facebook's users be reasonably expected to understand what they're signing up for? "I would imagine probably most people do not read the whole thing," Zuckerberg responded. "But everyone has the opportunity to and consents to it."

What if, before you consented, you could at least read the SparkNotes? That's the goal of ToSDR—short for Terms of Service; Didn’t Read—a website that turns lengthy terms of service agreements into bulleted summaries, and then rates those terms from Class A (very good) to Class F (very bad). It functions as a sort of Wikipedia for terms of service agreements. Anyone can submit a bullet point and share their analysis of a service's terms, which get turned into a rating of a site's overall policy. The site, which has existed since 2012 but is relaunching next month on a new platform, hopes to create a broad network of shared knowledge.

"If nobody can individually read these terms," says Hugo Roy, who helped create ToSDR, "then we have to figure out a collective solution."

At Your (Terms of) Service

The idea for ToSDR came about in 2011. Roy, then a law student, had been hanging around the Berlin hacker scene when he met Michiel de Jong, a programmer, and Jan-Christoph Borchardt, a designer. The three shared an interest in digital rights activism and marveled, one day, about how easy it was for websites to change their terms of service without notifying users. What's more, it was near impossible to make sense of how those changes would affect you as a user or make informed decisions about using certain sites. For years, the European Union had issued grades to commercial appliances to make it easier for consumers to understand which machines were most energy efficient. "You don’t have to know about how electricity works or how a washing machine works. You just have a rating which will tell you this is good, this is bad," says Roy. What if they created a similar system for services on the internet?

The trio brought the idea to Chaos Communication Camp, a quasi-Burning-Man for hackers in the German countryside. The festival gave them the opportunity to hash out what a site like ToSDR might look like, and how it would translate dense terms of service into useful bits of information. Borchardt, the designer, took inspiration from the EU’s energy label and created a color-coded scale to show which services had the most and least user-friendly terms. But unlike the EU's system, ToSDR wouldn't have a dedicated agency to issue grades. Instead, they’d let the group decide. The fact that Github's terms allow users to request indefinite removal of your personal information? Great. The fact that Instagram can retain your content even after you delete your account? Not so great. "It’s a collective of users organizing themselves to discuss and rate and try to come up with an agreement on what's good term and what's not," says Roy.

"If nobody can individually read these terms, then we have to figure out a collective solution." — Hugo Roy, co-creater of Terms of Service; Didn't Read

The idea went over well, and after Chaos Communication Camp, the trio decided to turn idea into reality. Jong and Borchardt were both working full-time on other projects, but Roy had taken the year off from law school for an eight-month internship, which left him with four months of free time to work on ToSDR. While Jong and Borchardt created a prototype of the site, Roy started in on legal analysis. He also formed a Google Group where people could submit summarized terms of services that Roy would enter into a database.