Avoid signing your rights away with EULAlyzer

I am really glad this software exists. It’s a little app which you can use to scan End User License Agreements  (you know those things that most people just scroll through and hit ‘agree’). Simply cut and paste the EULA into the program, and it will flag any suspect phrases for you to check.  It’s pretty unreasonable to expect people to read pages and pages of legal “agreement” before using your product or service, but the fact is that some companies rely on this to try to sneak spyware onto your computer, or share (sell!) your data to other companies. EULAlyzer is a nice way to get out of reading all the detail, but still checking for nasties.

I ran EULAlyzer’s own EULA through the program and it flagged the word “third party” as a phrase of interest. You simply need to click to be shown each place where the suspect phrase occurs in the EULA. In this case, the software wasn’t trying to trick me into handing over my personal details to third parties, it was just referring to third parties as users of the software. But I’m glad I checked. :)

You can download EULAlyzer here - it’s freeware and there’s a paid pro version available.

[via Makeuseof.com]