You don’t always read the Terms of Service before accepting them. Not for hardware, not for software, not for websites. We’re fairly certain that no one ever does. (Someone out there, please prove us wrong.) What we really needed all along is a service that reads over all of that legal language and gives you the highlights of the ToS, then explains which features are good or are bad for you as a consumer. Now that service exists. It even has little pictures that tell you which parts of the ToS are good or bad. Meet ToS;DR.

If you’re not familiar with the term, “TL;DR” stands for “too long; didn’t read” and signifies when someone on the Internet who is smart enough to use a semicolon is too lazy to read anything with more than 200 words. It’s also how people label pre-emptive executive summaries on lengthy posts or comments. ToS;DR aims to create handy summaries for terms of service. They rate particular policies and requirements as “good,” “mediocre,” “Alert,” or “informative.” In this scheme, “Alert” signifies “Bad.” Eventually, each site will be assigned a “class,” from A to F, depending on how consumer-friendly its policies are.

The project is crowdsourced, open, and collaborative. If you’re skilled at translating legalese into human language, can code in Javascript, or have other potentially useful skills, consider helping out.

ToS;DR [Official Site]

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