PrivacySpy: Rating privacy policies for transparency & accountability.

Most people don’t have the patience to read privacy policies. But privacy is important, and we shouldn’t just trust that products are treating our data right. PrivacySpy uses a consistent rubric to grade privacy policies on a ten-point scale.

Igor and I (co-makers) are 18-year-old data privacy and security geeks. But even though we care about how our information is handled, we rarely take the time to read through the privacy policies of the services we use. And we don’t think we’re in the minority here. PrivacySpy uses a consistent rubric to assign companies’ privacy policies a rating on a ten-point scale. That way, you can easily get a sense of how the services you’re using are treating your data—without spending hours pouring over privacy legalese. All of our evaluations are backed by citations to the original policy itself. PrivacySpy has a lot of other features that I haven’t mentioned here (like signing up for notifications when a policy changes, submitting ratings yourself, installing a browser extension that auto-displays ratings, etc.), so please check out PrivacySpy yourself and let us know what you think! We hope you find it useful. P.S.: PrivacySpy is completely open-source and supported by a non-profit. PRs welcome.

Although I'm a bit biased being one of the contributors, I think PrivacySpy is one of the greatest ways to see at a glance what services are treating you as a person and which are treating you as a product. The core developers of PrivacySpy, Miles and Igor, are amazing and have spent countless hours developing this platform that has grown to amazing proportions. I can't wait to see what they bring to the table next with Politiwatch, as well as to PrivacySpy in the future.