This article was published on May 13, 2012

TOSSOS aims to make sense of your favorite sites’ terms of service and privacy policies


TOSSOS aims to make sense of your favorite sites’ terms of service and privacy policies

Let’s be honest, most of us don’t bother to read the terms of service for most online services that we sign up to. We just want to get to the good stuff and skip the boring legalese. Meanwhile, wouldn’t it be good to be able to compare the terms of service of two competing products (Google Drive and Dropbox, for example) to see which one seems like the best deal?

TOSSOS is a new site that aims to solve both of these problems by becoming a central place to store and compare different services’ terms and conditions. The idea is that the site stores current terms of service and privacy policies, while archiving older versions so it’s easy to compare what’s changed over time. Great idea, right?

TOSSOS was created as a weekend project by Brooklyn-based developer Sebastian Lemery. While it’s still at an early stage, the site could well become a major resource over time. Lemery has added the ability for users to submit Terms of Service from around the Web to be considered for adding to the site.

Future plans for the site include plain English summaries of important parts of each document and an API to allow other services to plug into the TOSSOS database. Currently built using Twitter’s Bootstrap UI construction kit, a more engaging design is also on the to-do list.

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As boring as they can be, terms of service govern our usage of practically the whole Web, so we wish Lemery the best in building a site that helps users make sense of them. If you’d like to help him in his mission, you can contact him via the website.

➤ TOSSOS

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