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faq-old-version.html
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<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<!-- DEPRICATED- there is a new faq page -->
<head>
<!-- jquery refactor link -->
<script src="https://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.10.2.js"></script>
</head>
<body>
<!-- ======= Nav Bar Section & Head Tag files imported from another file ======= -->
<div id="nav-placeholder"></div>
<script>
$.get("navBar.html", function(data){
$("#nav-placeholder").replaceWith(data);
});
</script>
<!-- ======= Frequently Asked Questions Section ======= -->
<section id="faq" class="faq section-bg2">
<div class="container" data-aos="fade-in">
<div class="section-title">
<h3>Frequently Asked Questions</h3>
<p>For more info, see our <a href="#" class="link" target="_blank">research paper</a>
and <a href="#" class="link" target="_blank">open-source dataset.</a></p>
</div>
<div class="row faq-item d-flex align-items-stretch">
<div class="col-lg-5">
<i class="bx bx-help-circle"></i>
<h4>What is ClearTerms?</h4>
</div>
<div class="col-lg-7">
<p>ClearTerms helps internet users better understand the policies they are implicitly agreeing to.
It uses a crowdsourcing model to highlight the terms that users find most valuable.
This helps online shoppers be more informed, and <span class="emphasis">helps consumer rights advocates
and public policy makers </span>better understand the ecommerce ecosystem.
</p>
</div>
</div>
<!-- End F.A.Q Item-->
<div class="row faq-item d-flex align-items-stretch">
<div class="col-lg-5">
<i class="bx bx-help-circle"></i>
<h4>Why did you create ClearTerms?</h4>
</div>
<div class="col-lg-7">
<p>Almost every web site has a Terms and Conditions, and they are often too difficult
and too painful to read. Researchers Aleecia McDonald and Lorrie Cranor calculated that
it would take a person <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/03/reading-the-privacy-policies-you-encounter-in-a-year-would-take-76-work-days/253851/" class="link" target="_blank">76 work days</a>
to read all the Terms & Conditions they encounter in a year. Extrapolated over the U.S. population,
it would cost <span class="emphasis">$781 billion dollars.</span> Another infographic from Reddit compares
the length of Terms & Conditions from popular sites to <a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/coolguides/comments/g5uarl/nobody_got_time_for_that/" class="link" target="_blank">classic works of literature.</a>
</p>
</div>
</div>
<!-- End F.A.Q Item-->
<div class="row faq-item d-flex align-items-stretch">
<div class="col-lg-5">
<i class="bx bx-help-circle"></i>
<h4>What kinds of surprising statements have you found in Terms & Conditions?</h4>
</div>
<div class="col-lg-7">
<p><a href="https://www.facebook.com/terms.php" class="link" target="_blank">Facebook</a> notoriously asks for
"permission to use your name, profile picture, and information about your actions with ads and
sponsored content." Airbnb is upfront about <a href="https://www.airbnb.com/terms" class="link" target="_blank">making it difficult to delete your account.</a>
These sites aren't the only ones - a quick Google search will turn up plenty of good stories about terms like these.
</p>
</div>
</div>
<!-- End F.A.Q Item-->
<div class="row faq-item d-flex align-items-stretch">
<div class="col-lg-5">
<i class="bx bx-help-circle"></i>
<h4>How exactly does ClearTerms work?</h4>
</div>
<div class="col-lg-7">
<p>ClearTerms uses a Machine Learning model to automatically extract important statements from websites’ T&C documents.
To build the model, we collected over 1500+ statements from 27 e-commerce websites, and hired crowd workers to
manually label which ones are important to know.
<br><br>To make the labeling process easier and more robust, we employed a
method called <span class="emphasis">pairwise comparison</span>, in which crowd workers select between two
statements at a time. This pairwise comparison method not only makes the labeling process easier for crowd workers
but also generates more reliable and accurate results.
<br><br>The comparison results are then fed into a <span class="emphasis">statistical model</span>
that will produce the ranking of statements, and finally, we used that result to train our model.
</p>
</div>
</div>
<!-- End F.A.Q Item-->
<div class="row faq-item d-flex align-items-stretch">
<div class="col-lg-5">
<i class="bx bx-help-circle"></i>
<h4>But everyone has different definitions of “importance,” right?</h4>
</div>
<div class="col-lg-7">
<p>Not as much as you’d think. In our research, we found <span class="emphasis">high voting consistency.</span>
The voting variances of the most important & least important statements are significantly lower than the middle statements.
In other words, <span class="emphasis">the most important and least important statements are highly agreed upon.</span>
</p>
</div>
</div>
<!-- End F.A.Q Item-->
<div class="row faq-item d-flex align-items-stretch">
<div class="col-lg-5">
<i class="bx bx-help-circle"></i>
<h4>How was the model trained and tested?</h4>
</div>
<div class="col-lg-7">
<p>
We trained the model with a Support Vector Machine (SVM) and a Grid Search on parameters C
(penalty parameter of the error term), kernel (which kernel to use) and gamma (the kernel coefficient).
The model was tested for accuracy via <span class="emphasis">5-fold cross-validation.</span> Ultimately, the model reached 86.8% accuracy,
93.2% recall, and 82.0% precision in detecting user-labelled important clauses.
</p>
</div>
</div>
<!-- End F.A.Q Item-->
<div class="row faq-item d-flex align-items-stretch">
<div class="col-lg-5">
<i class="bx bx-help-circle"></i>
<h4>What are some interesting research findings from analyzing Terms and Conditions?</h4>
</div>
<div class="col-lg-7">
<p>
We used <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pearson%27s_chi-squared_test" class="link" target="_blank">Pearson’s chi-squared test</a>
to find the top 20 words most correlated with important statements in our data set. This plot suggests consumers place
high value on potential <span class="emphasis">financial loss</span>, with terms like “fee”, “price”, and “damages”.
Many words are also related to return/cancellation policies, e,g, “cancel”, “terminate”, and “original”, as are words relating
to shipping policies, e.g. “distribute”, “days”, and “shipping”.
</p>
</div>
</div>
<!-- End F.A.Q Item-->
<div class="row faq-item d-flex align-items-stretch">
<div class="col-lg-5">
<i class="bx bx-help-circle"></i>
<h4>What statement types do consumers seem to care most about?</h4>
</div>
<div class="col-lg-7">
<p>
We found that statements relating to <span class="emphasis">product/services</span> - specifically those related to
returning, cancellation, and shipping policies - appeared the highest number of times, comprising a third of the
top 5 statements. For example, one site stipulates: “Unless you cancel within 14 days from today, you will be
automatically charged the full purchase fee ($88.92) 14 days from today and enrolled in our auto-ship program.”
<br><br><a href="https://www.neimanmarcus.com/c/Assistance/Privacy-Policy-Terms-of-Use-cat33940739" class="link" target="_blank">
Neiman Marcus</a> informs consumers of their “...ongoing commitment to ensure that your shopping experience...is protected,
we will prosecute all unauthorized or fraudulent transactions to the fullest extent allowed by law.”
This statement type frequency suggests that consumers place a high value on <span class="emphasis">money-related issues</span>,
which corresponds to our chi-square test results in the previous section.
<br><br> The second most frequent statement type relates to the company’s ability to <span class="emphasis">control content
generated and uploaded by the user.</span> For example, <a href="https://sgsg.samsung.com/service/agreement.php" class="link" target="_blank">Samsung</a>
states their right that “Any Submission may be used by Samsung without restriction for any purpose whatsoever, including,
without limitation, reproduction, disclosure, transmission, publication, broadcast or posting...”. Other high ranking statements
refer to the company’s right to delete user content, or to even fine users for bad reviews on review websites.
</p>
</div>
</div>
<!-- End F.A.Q Item-->
<div class="row faq-item d-flex align-items-stretch">
<div class="col-lg-5">
<i class="bx bx-help-circle"></i>
<h4>What are the limitations of ClearTerms’ method for analyzing Terms and Conditions?</h4>
</div>
<div class="col-lg-7">
<p>
We're not perfect! Some of our limitations include:
<ul>
<li>The model only works for <span class="emphasis">e-commerce</span> sites right now.</li>
<li>Though pairwise comparison lowers the cognitive load for crowd workers, pulling individual
statements out from the full document may lose some context.</li>
<li>Terms and Conditions are filled with complex jargon that is sometimes hard to understand
in the first place. It's hard for people to understand a <span class="emphasis">"worldwide license"
to use content you generate"</span> or phrases like <span class="emphasis">"in perpetutity."</span>
</li>
</ul>
</p>
</div>
</div>
<!-- End F.A.Q Item-->
<div class="row faq-item d-flex align-items-stretch">
<div class="col-lg-5">
<i class="bx bx-help-circle"></i>
<h4>How is ClearTerms different from TOS;DR?</h4>
</div>
<div class="col-lg-7">
<p>
Much like ClearTerms, <a href="https://tosdr.org/" class="link" target="_blank">TOS;DR</a> aims to analyze
the terms of service and privacy policies of major Internet sites and services. While TOS;DR relies fully
on crowd workers to do this, ClearTerms uses a natural language model to rank important statements.
There's pros and cons to both, but this allows us to <span class="emphasis">analyze more policies</span>,
and makes it easier for us to keep our analyses <span class="emphasis">up to date</span> as web sites
update their Terms and Conditions.
<br><br>We're not the only ones using ML to look at online activity! There are more projects going on
at <a href="https://www.isri.cmu.edu/" class="link" target="_blank">CMU</a>, including those in
<a href="https://www.isri.cmu.edu/people/core-faculty/sadeh-norman.html" class="link" target="_blank">Norman Sadeh's</a> lab.
</p>
</div>
</div>
<!-- End F.A.Q Item-->
<div class="row faq-item d-flex align-items-stretch">
<div class="col-lg-5">
<i class="bx bx-help-circle"></i>
<h4>How can I help with ClearTerms?</h4>
</div>
<div class="col-lg-7">
<p>
Volunteers can help by participating in <span class="emphasis">pairwise comparison</span> -
by comparing individual statements on <a href="crowd.html">this page</a>.
<br><br>If you have skills in machine learning or data science, you can check out our open-source data
and look for better ways of improving our models. For example, some Terms and Conditions are highly similar
in text, probably because of templates. We're also looking into classifying the
<span class="emphasis">category</span> of the statement too. If you have any ideas, let us know!
</p>
</div>
</div>
<!-- End F.A.Q Item-->
<div class="row faq-item d-flex align-items-stretch">
<div class="col-lg-5">
<i class="bx bx-help-circle"></i>
<h4>Who is the team behind ClearTerms?</h4>
</div>
<div class="col-lg-7">
<p>
We are researchers and designers at Carnegie Mellon University that do work in usable privacy and security.
Check out <a href="http://privacygrade.org" target="_blank">related work</a> by our <a href="https://github.com/CMUChimpsLab" target="_blank">research group</a>.
<br><br>Research Lab Lead: <a href="http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~jasonh/" target="_blank">Jason Hong</a>
<br>ML Model: Bruce Liu
<br>Website Design & Implementation: <a href="https://sskellner.github.io/portfolio/" target="_blank">Stacy Kellner</a>
<br><br>Thanks to Jonathan Dinu, Jineet Doshi, Brandon Jiang, Siddharth Nair, Alex Sciuto, and Sarah Shy
for looking at ways of improving the machine learning models.
<br><br>Thanks to Annabel Sun, Shawn Hanna, Arpita Agarwal, Lu Chen, Jennifer Kong, and Rosie Sun for
doing the initial data collection and building out early versions of ClearTerms.
<br><br>Thanks to Chaiwut Chaianuchittrakul and Angelia for doing the early investigations into this work.
</p>
</div>
</div>
<!-- End F.A.Q Item-->
</div>
</section><!-- End Frequently Asked Questions Section -->
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<div><br><a href="index.html#about">About Us</a></div>
<div><a href="#">Frequently Asked Questions</a></div>
<div><a href="crowd.html">Help Rank Terms & Conditions</a></div>
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