So I'm here to talk to you about the digital common that I'm quite passionate about, Open
Terms Archive, which is a digital public good incubated within the French Ministry for
Foreign Affairs.
It has been existing for three years.
The code base is under an European Union public license.
And its goal is to enable the democratic control of digital platform.
Make sure to shift the power balance from the large digital services to the end users
and regulators.
How do we do this by measuring the evolution of the rules, the terms of services, which
are actually the way in which the services decide that you can do things or not.
And oftentimes it takes over some regulations.
And we provide tools to archive and enable analyzing and influencing those rules.
We are basically creating technical tools that will enable us to unite different actors
who are powerful enough to influence the rules of these large actors to be more loyal, more
respectful of end users.
Right now this is a bit blurry, but it's going to get better now.
So who do we try to unite?
We just looked at who can impact, who can really change the behavior of those large
actors who are not respecting your privacy, who are not respecting your rights online.
Regulators, if I'm a privacy regulation authority and I can have a million euro fine on some
company, it's going to change its behavior way more than if I'm just yelling at it that
it's not respecting me.
Legislation, it can take a long time to be enacted.
I think about 10 years for GDPR, but once it's in place it does actually change things.
Why?
Because someone in the big companies actually fears to go to jail.
And that's quite impactful as well.
Takes a long time, but useful.
Press and media.
There are tons of articles that say that some companies are bad and evil, but sometimes
there's enough coverage that it will actually threaten their business model or their user
base.
It happens sometimes.
Think, for example, on the WhatsApp case where they had to back down because so many
people were afraid of it, didn't like the change.
And finally, consumer protection associations, such as some of you might have heard of the
Shrems, for example, cases in the EU that prevented the bulk sending of transfer of data
of EU citizens or any consumer protection association that can go on a lawsuit against
the companies.
So we have demonstrated this impact model by providing tools that have been taken over
by the European Commission for ensuring that some regulations were actually impactful on
the behavior of companies.
We have been in contact with Congress people in the US and so on and so forth.
So we have these examples, and I have to be fast now.
This is a DPGA public good session, so I want to highlight that we've been selected for
the Nobel Prize Summit thanks to the DPGA.
So we're very thankful to the Digital Public Goods Alliance.
And if some of you are considering applying to be a DPG, I can talk more about it, but
yeah, it's cool.
Okay, that was not geeky enough for FOSDEM.
I know.
So now how does this work and how can you participate?
First of all, we just need to define which documents you want to track.
That's quite simple.
You just use a URL and then a set of selectors like CSS stuff, usually just CSS selectors,
a bit of JS if it's necessary, but it's like 5% of the cases.
So here you define your target documents that we are going to track.
Then we have made the tracking part quite simple.
You could think that you could put together a script in half a day to just download stuff.
That's true, but there's a difference between this.
Time's up.
I say it's four minutes.
Sorry.
Okay.
So, yeah, oh, good.
So yeah, we do this with software.
We store every version and then we make it readable.
So basically we will extract just the legal text instead of having all the menu navigation
stuff and all that.
And we will provide a diff for all these people, regulators, legislatures, all these people
who don't really get all this stuff, but now they have a way to be notified when there's
a change.
And then we can have humans who will write down a summary of what has changed and circulate
it around.
And then instead of having one person there, one press person here, one regulator yelling,
we have all of them together and thus we believe we can actually influence.
We also provide data sets and this is a decentralized system.
We would love to have more instances if you want to create a new one in your country jurisdiction.
Please do.
It's going to be amazing.
Please visit us at contact at opentermsarchive.org.