I have ongoing business with: banks, telecoms, energy suppliers, cloud services, etc.

They all have dynamic terms of service (ToS) and privacy policies. They may or may not notify me when they change it. If they bother to notify me, the msg always reads like this: “we are making changes to benefit you…” Yeah, bullshit. These notices never give the useful details. They hide them. Corporations don’t want you to be aware of how they are going to fuck you over more in the future.

The fix seems simple: we have a tool that once per month fetches the terms of service and privacy policies for all the suppliers we have a relationship with. The tool could extract the text and check it into a local git repo. Another tool could diff the different versions and feed that into an AI program that tells you in plain English what changes. It could even add a bit of character and say “Next month we’re going fuck you more by increasing penalties for late payments and shortening the grace period”.

It would also be useful if the AI would input the whole privacy policy and produce a Cliff’s Notes extraction of what’s important. It could take care to detect weasel wording and give the honest meaning (like when the policy says “we only share your personal data when legally permitted”, which really means “we pawn your ass to the full extent legally possible”.

Another nice to have feature: you feed it the privacy policies of 10 different banks, and it compares them and produces a detailed report that ranks them on the extent of the privacy abuses.