Termite:
A Privacy Policy Browser Extension
What is Termite?
Termite is a browser extension that analyzes online privacy policies, terms, and agreements, rates them on their content, and provides users with understandable insights, all in real-time.
What We Rate
Our algorithms classify text into one of six categories, listed below, which we have identified as the topics that are most representative of internet users' privacy concerns.
Censorship and Suspension
This category covers a service’s stance on control and ownership of content, data, and services. It also covers deletion and suspension of accounts. Lastly, it covers how services handle violations of community guidelines, as well as hate speech, libel and extremism.
Deletion and Retention
This category covers the user’s ability and rights to take action to delete their own data, cancel their accounts, as well as how long a service keeps your data. Some services exercise unlimited retention, while others limit their retention by deleting logs of your data on a regular basis, such as every 90 days. We also evaluate how vague or transparent a service is with respect to its deletion and retention policies.
Cookie Policy and Tracking
This covers how services track you while using their services. Cookies are small pieces of data sent from a website and stored on the user's web browser. Cookie policies govern activities such as tracking, collecting, storing, sharing, selling and otherwise optimizing a user’s experience, including targeted advertising. While some services cannot function at all without using some form of tracking technology, other uses of tracking with cookies are used for data aggregation purposes.
Data Collection and Usage
This covers what types of data services collect, and for what use. Given that users have subjective expectations about how a website should be collecting and using data, and that this subjectivity is further complicated by the context of a website's services, we decided to evaluate policies on how transparent they are, rather than passing a value judgment on whether the reported data collection and usage practices are appropriate.
Information Sharing and Selling
This covers how and why services may share or sell your data. Services may share or sell your data for a variety of purposes, including internal and market analytics, medical or academic research purposes, and legal compliance, among others. Websites can make the decision to only share anonymized and aggregated data, while others might share personally identifiable information (PII). We value the protection of users' PII and the minimization of data sharing to third parties.
Policy Changes
This category covers how easy it is for users to view the history of a service’s policies, as well as whether a service notifies users about changes made to its policies. We prioritize transparency, considering that many policy updates contain stipulations that impact users' privacy rights immediately.