Impact and effort measurement

Open Terms Archive's mission is to shift the power balance from large platforms to their users and regulators. Measuring the specific impact of Open Terms Archive in such a broad task is difficult, if not impossible. Despite these limitations, we seek to measure the effect of our efforts, both to maximise it and out of accountability to the entities that trust us.

Qualitative impact

Much of the impact of Open Terms Archive is inherently unmeasurable. In this section we refer to prominent cases that illustrate those effects that make sense when contextualised and lose meaning when reduced to a number, as their systemic impact is not linear with their occurrence.

Bills

Open Terms Archive supported the TLDR Act (for Terms-of-service Labeling, Design, and Readability), a US bill co-sponsored by Congresswoman Lori Trahan (D-MA-03), Senator Bill Cassidy (R-LA), and Senator Ben Ray Luján (D-NM) to enforce the publication of summaries of terms of use in machine-readable formats.

Requests to service providers

Thanks to Open Terms Archive data, some partners address service providers directly. For example, France's largest consumer protection association, UFC-Que Choisir, was able to request (and obtain) the correction of non-functional links to cooling-off cancellation forms.

Press articles supported by data

When articles objectify their investigations with data from the Open Terms Archive, online service providers know that their actions are under scrutiny.