How To Spot Changes To Small Print At Google, Facebook, Twitter And More

A digital rights group has created an automatic system for tracking changes to website terms and conditions and privacy policies. The tool is designed to help users of websites to keep up to date with their rights and obligations.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is the digital rights advocacy group behind TOSBack.org, the tool that allows web users to see who is changing what. The EFF said that it created the site because many website users are ignorant of how much their behaviour is controlled by such policies.

"Terms of service form the foundation of your relationship with social networking sites, online businesses, and other internet communities, but most people become aware of these terms only when there's a problem," said the group's activism and technology manager Tim Jones. "We created TOSBack to help consumers monitor terms of service for the websites they use everyday, and show how the terms change over time."

Already this month the service has highlighted a change to the privacy policy of social networking giant Facebook and to the domain name registration agreement and the universal terms of service of web hosting company GoDaddy.

Users can subscribe to an RSS feed which will automatically update them when there is a change to the terms and conditions of one of the organisations monitored. The list of site which are monitored includes Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Craigslist, Data.gov, DoubleClick, EBay, GoDaddy, Google, MySpace, Twitter and YouTube.