If you’ve been using the Internet for any amount of time, you know that all that fine print on the apps and websites you use is probably taking advantage of you somehow, you just don’t know exactly how. Clicking “I agree” feels like the easiest thing to do, but do you really know what you just agreed to? Wouldn’t it be nice if there was somebody out there fighting to help make sure that we all know what we’re actually signing up for? Fortunately for all of us, there is — and we’re proud to support them as a member of Fast Forward, our program at Fastly for supporting the organizations helping make the internet good.
We’re thrilled to highlight Terms of Service; Didn't Read (ToS; DR) – a non-profit project that makes it easy to understand terms of service and privacy policies by simplifying their language and rating them. With over 36,000 registered contributors and around 500 active contributors per month, ToS;DR organizes a large community of activists to achieve their mission of open legal information in a way that only the internet can support.
The spirit of open source, increased transparency, and visibility benefits everyone who uses the site. ToS;DR serves as a public record of transparent user rights and is a very effective advocate for users. But that kind of impact comes with significant scaling challenges. ToS;DR maintains a public index and a heavily-used browser extension that makes it easy to view site terms when using services, as well as the tools to enable community contributions and information updates. The tradeoff for simple user contributions is always an increased surface area for possible attacks and increased vulnerabilities.
Before using Fastly, ToS;DR experienced ongoing usage and attack spikes, “Every 10 minutes we saw on the server that it would be killed because of out-of-memory errors, which was very concerning,” said Erik Hering, Lead Developer at TOS;DR. “Since we migrated [to Fastly], our uptime has been up 100% since moving.” This kind of improvement in performance and security lets the ToS;DR team focus on their core mission of internet transparency instead of things like fighting DDoS attacks or managing scaling challenges. For a small team, the ability to reclaim time and development cycles is invaluable.
Increased uptime, improved performance, and enhanced security make the internet a better place for everyone, and Fastly's commitment to supporting organizations like ToS;DR goes beyond just providing technical solutions. Our Fast Forward program is as much about community and communication as it is about scaling and security. We love learning from, and connecting with, everyone who’s making the Internet better every day.
To learn more about ToS;DR, visit their public index and download their browser extension. If you’re a member of a public-good organization that is improving the web, learn more about how Fastly can support you with our Fast Forward program.
