“The Applied Social Media Lab (ASML) at Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society is pleased to announce the release of Transparency Hub, a user-friendly tool that aggregates policy documents and associated data of technology and social media companies allowing both researchers and users to  search, compare, and analyze how policies have changed over time. With a collection of over 20,000 terms of service, privacy policy, and community guideline documents from over 300 companies, the Transparency Hub system facilitates easier research and engagement with public-facing policy documents, offering greater accessibility and insight into how these companies use data. “Changes to privacy policies usually arrive as a pop-up or an email — notifications that research shows most people never read,” said ASML Senior Director Meg Marco. “Transparency Hub collects and archives policy documents in one place, making it easier for researchers, journalists, and platform users to understand and compare the changes that affect them — and millions of other people.” Transparency Hub consists of a user-facing website that, behind the scenes, uses automated mechanisms to detect and download updated policy documents from existing companies. The system offers features for users to search past and current documents from a single platform in order to identify how policies have evolved over time, and to compare documents across different platforms. Additionally, Transparency Hub uses AI to conduct automated data quality checks of new document captures to ensure that information is accurate and up to date…”