Request creation of free software missing from the commons 🗽🐧🐏

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This is a place to ask whether free open source software exists for a particular purpose. If it’s non-existent, specify your software requirements here so your dream can be well articulated for everyone to either laugh at or share the dream and give moral support for you to create it yourself. Or you might even to pitch the idea so well that a developer loves the idea enough to run off and build it for you.

No other community exists for this purpose but there are some loosely related ones. If existing software closely delivers what you need but is missing a feature, you might post a wishlist/feature request here or in !bugs@sopuli.xyz.

The FSF has a software directory that can help with finding software.

Loosely related decentralised communities generally for FOSS:

There is also foss@beehaw.org but I don’t recommend it because the mod is trigger happy with censorship. E.g. if you post about FOSS advocacy it will get removed as it does not relate to any particular FOSS application. There are also many more FOSS forums duplicated in centralised places which are not conducive to the digital rights spirit of free open source software, so they are omitted.

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nonserf@libretechni.ca

Using AI against the corps -- to detect changes in privacy policies and terms of service (libretechni.ca)

submitted 3 weeks ago by nonserf@libretechni.ca to c/foss_requests@libretechni.ca

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I have ongoing business with: banks, telecoms, energy suppliers, cloud services, etc.

They all have dynamic terms of service (ToS) and privacy policies. They may or may not notify me when they change it. If they bother to notify me, the msg always reads like this: “we are making changes to benefit you…” Yeah, bullshit. These notices never give the useful details. They hide them. Corporations don’t want you to be aware of how they are going to fuck you over more in the future.

The fix seems simple: we have a tool that once per month fetches the terms of service and privacy policies for all the suppliers we have a relationship with. The tool could extract the text and check it into a local git repo. Another tool could diff the different versions and feed that into an AI program that tells you in plain English what changes. It could even add a bit of character and say “Next month we’re going fuck you more by increasing penalties for late payments and shortening the grace period”.

It would also be useful if the AI would input the whole privacy policy and produce a Cliff’s Notes extraction of what’s important. It could take care to detect weasel wording and give the honest meaning (like when the policy says “we only share your personal data when legally permitted”, which really means “we pawn your ass to the full extent legally possible”.

Another nice to have feature: you feed it the privacy policies of 10 different banks, and it compares them and produces a detailed report that ranks them on the extent of the privacy abuses.

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