[sunsetonsaturn]

Diffing texts is not the way to go, because sometimes they can change the wording without changing the meaning - yet, the diff will give you a lot to sift through in order to answer the question "what has changed?"

A better approach is proposed in this paper: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-76663-4_...

It discusses a formal notation of privacy terms, which enables you to treat them like tuples and perform all sorts of set algebra operations with them, making it easy to answer questions such as "what has changed?", "what has been removed?" or "what was added?"

This would make it possible not only to compare a policy with another version of itself, but also compare it with policies of competing services and products.

Consumers would be better off if regulators mandated the storage of policies in a format like this one. An ecosystem of utilities could be built around them (change trackers, search engines, recommendation systems, etc.).

[chirau]

While the solution proposed in that paper is theoretically better, its feasibility is super low given how fragmented and disparate these companies make the documents and how tough it would be to lobby for a standard. As such, for now, the diff route is the most realistic way to go.

We cannot dismiss a solution to status quo for a solution that assumes an imaginary state of affairs.