Eric Howes drew my attention to this application several weeks ago and I’ve been using it to analyze End User License Agreements (EULA) ever since.
To work it, you click “analyze,” cut and paste the text of a EULA into a text box “License Agreement to Analyze” and click the “analyze” button. It will find key words and phrases and display them in a nicely organized fashion with an “Interest Level” rating (0=low interest, 10=something you should probably think about). Click the icons to the right of the ratings and it pulls up and highlights the text in the “License Agreement Text” text box.
It flags the relevant text under the categories:
— advertising
— privacy; web bugs
— privacy; Zip/postal code
— promotional messages
— third party
— without notice
Clicking on any of those headings in the display drops down a list of “hits” that you can explore further.
There aren’t any “help” menus and some of their terms could use further definition (“a healthy read” apparently means that the EULA isn’t too short or too long), but it’s mostly intuitive.
EULAlyzer doesn’t really say something is “good,” “bad” or “ugly” but it does draw your attention to text that should be of “high interest” to you.
You can analyze instantly a 20-page EULA and discover statements like: “When individuals use the Internet, the Network uses such persons’ Individual Information to show advertising for products and services in which those users have expressed an interest, whether directly or indirectly.”
“Expressed an interest… indirectly” sounds to me like either browser monitoring or verbiage from the middle school dating scene.
Go here to get the freeware, or buy the “pro” version.
Tom Kelchner