Privacy Policy Scanner

Whenever you sign up for anything on the internet, before you click submit, there is something like a check box saying that you agree to the site's "privacy policy". From the name of the thing, you'd think that it was a good thing: "oh, it protects my privacy, so I bet they won't sell my information to those pesky spammers". WRONG. For all you know, that policy could guarantee that your information will definitely be sold, because nobody (well, at least almost nobody) bothers to read those things.

So, what I propose is some kind of program, possibly a browser plugin, which can analyze these policies, looking at syntax and keywords which hint that the policy contains something that you probably wouldn't agree to, if you knew it was there. Then, it could report it's findings back to you, with excerpts from where it found dubious or iffy wording, and let you decide. Or for the especially lazy, there could be an option to let the program use its "better judgment" and simply give you a thumbs-up or thumbs-down (a bun or a bone, if you will).

Alternatively, I picture a website, that maintains a database of sites that have privacy policies. People that are good at understanding the policies and/or are paid by the site can write up reviews, and give rankings to the policies of different sites, in addition to a computerized analysis, as described above.

I think that this is a pretty plausible idea, and I hope that it will at some point be baked.