See what a privacy policy says POLICYLENS

What it flags

Privacy policies and terms of service are long because length is a defence: the clauses that matter are true, disclosed, and buried in four thousand words of ordinary description. This reads the text you paste and pulls out the ones people actually want to know about.

• Selling or sharing your data, including the phrasing that avoids the word: "share with partners", "disclose to third parties for business purposes", "transfer as part of a merger".
• Forced arbitration and class-action waivers, which decide what you can do if something goes wrong and are usually a single paragraph in capitals.
• Retention: how long they keep things after you leave, and whether "delete" means deleted or deactivated.
• Unilateral change: whether they may alter the terms without telling you, with continued use counting as agreement.
• Licence to your content, and how broad it is.
• Where the data goes, which jurisdictions, and which law governs a dispute.

Reading what comes back

A flag is a pointer to a paragraph, not a judgement about it. Several of these clauses are ordinary and necessary: every service needs some licence to display what you upload, and every company transfers data to sub-processors. The question a flag asks you is whether the scope is what you expected, and that is a reading task the tool hands back to you with the paragraph attached.

It works on the text you give it, so it sees only what you paste. Most policies incorporate others by reference (a cookie policy, a sub-processor list, a separate arbitration agreement), and those are separate documents that need pasting separately. A policy that is mostly links to other policies is itself worth noticing.

What this is not

It is not legal advice and it is not a rating. A policy can be clear, complete, lawful and still describe something you do not want; another can be vague and describe a service that does very little with your data. The useful output is that you have now read the six paragraphs that matter instead of none of them.

For what a site actually does rather than what it says, COOKIEAUDIT sorts the cookies it really sets and FINGERPRINT shows what it can recognise you by without one.