Terms, Privacy & Policy Diff Monitor

Track what changed in public terms, privacy policies, cookie policies, and other agreements without rereading entire documents. This Actor deterministically segments text into clauses, compares a supplied or stored baseline, flags additions/removals/modifications, identifies obligation/entity/date/risk changes, and returns bounded before/after evidence. No external AI key is required.

This Actor provides automated change detection, not legal advice. A qualified lawyer should review material findings and the cited source text.

What you get

• Clause-level clause-added, clause-removed, and clause-modified records.
• Explicit obligation, named-entity, effective/retention date, and risk signal changes.
• Deterministic signals for arbitration, class-action waivers, data sharing/sale, advertising, retention, precise location, automatic renewal, termination, indemnity, liability, jurisdiction, and unilateral changes.
• Materiality, 0–100 risk score, risk level, confidence, heading, and before/after evidence.
• A persistent baseline in your named key-value store for scheduled monitoring.

Input options

Use any combination of:

• documents[].url for a public HTTP or HTTPS policy.
• documents[].currentContent plus optional previousContent for private, local, or already-fetched HTML/text.
• datasetId for a dataset containing the same document fields.
• No input for the built-in before/after privacy-policy sample.

Use policyType to label terms, privacy, cookies, or another policy. ignoreSelectors removes site-specific navigation or widgets. matchThreshold controls clause pairing. includeEvidenceText: false removes the full normalized policy while retaining each change's bounded evidence.

Stateful behavior

The first successful URL check creates a baseline. Later checks return unchanged or changed. Supplying previousContent performs an immediate comparison and overrides stored state. resetBaseline replaces state without classifying the replacement as a change. State is updated only after a useful output and successful pay-per-event charge.

Charging and failure safety

A one-time $0.0004 Actor-start event covers measured platform startup and URL-safety validation. The primary policy-diff-analyzed event is charged only after a document is fetched or accepted inline, segmented, compared, risk-classified, and prepared as a useful result. Invalid URLs, private-network targets, HTTP errors, oversized responses, empty policies, and other failures return dataset diagnostics with no value-event charge. The OUTPUT summary—including the not-legal-advice caveat—is separate and uncharged. The Actor checks the PPE budget before work and stops cleanly at the event limit.

Network, evidence, and privacy safety

HTTP fetching is bounded by time, response size, content type, and five redirects. Every initial URL and redirect is revalidated. Localhost plus private, loopback, link-local, carrier-grade NAT, benchmarking, multicast, reserved IPv4, unique-local IPv6, and link-local IPv6 destinations are rejected. URL mode reads a public policy; inline mode avoids network access. Evidence and snapshots are stored in your Apify storage—use private runs and disable full evidence text for sensitive material.

Output

Each dataset row contains status, policy identity/type, clause count, fingerprint, diff, evidence, warnings, pricing, valueEvent, and the legal disclaimer. diff.changes[].signalChanges lists added and removed obligation/entity/date/risk signals. OUTPUT contains uncharged run counts, material-change totals, budget status, and the same disclaimer.

Limitations and responsible use

This HTTP-first MVP does not execute JavaScript, log in, bypass access controls, interpret images/PDFs, or determine legal effect. Heuristics may miss unusual drafting or classify benign wording as material. Results do not establish compliance, risk, enforceability, or required action. Verify the source and consult qualified counsel. Monitor only documents you are allowed to access and follow applicable terms, privacy rules, and laws.

Local verification

npm install
npm run typecheck
npm test
npm run build
npm run benchmark
npm run launch:verify