How ConductAtlas captures, verifies, archives, and classifies platform policy documents. This page describes our data standards, archival methodology, and the structure of the evidence we provide.
Why this page exists: Compliance teams, legal counsel, and researchers need to know where our data comes from, how we verify it, and why our records are citable. This page answers those questions in detail.
ConductAtlas tracks publicly available policy documents from more than 170 platforms, including terms of service, privacy policies, community guidelines, acceptable use policies, fee schedules, cookie policies, data processing addenda, and related governance documents. Our focus is on consumer-facing and business-facing platforms in categories including financial services, consumer technology, social media, AI services, healthcare technology, and e-commerce.
We capture every new version of a monitored document as it changes. We do not edit or modify the source content — we archive it exactly as the platform published it.
Our monitoring service runs daily, with every tracked document fetched and compared against the prior version on record. Most captures run in a single batch at approximately 06:00 UTC; time-sensitive documents can be captured more frequently.
For documents rendered by JavaScript or protected by anti-bot measures, we use a headless browser environment (Playwright) that renders pages the same way a real browser would, including executing JavaScript and handling modern web application frameworks.
Every captured document is hashed using SHA-256. If the hash matches the prior version, we record a verification event but do not create a new version row. If the hash differs, we perform a textual diff to confirm the change is substantive (rather than, for example, a dynamically generated element unrelated to policy content). Substantive changes produce a new document version and trigger downstream processing.
Every captured version is stored with:
This evidence chain is designed for legal and regulatory use. A document captured on April 14, 2026, with a specific SHA-256 hash can be independently verified against the Wayback Machine and against the platform's own historical record if they maintain one.
Each document is parsed to identify individual provisions — distinct clauses or sections that create rights, obligations, or limitations. Provisions are extracted with their location in the source document and classified into one of 20 canonical types covering areas such as arbitration, data collection, data sharing, liability limitation, account control, platform discretion, and enforcement actions.
Each provision is classified as high, medium, or low severity based on its impact on users. Severity reflects factors including:
Severity classifications are produced by AI-assisted analysis using Anthropic's Claude models, reviewed against established compliance frameworks, and refined through our canonical taxonomy. We document our classification criteria and welcome feedback on specific classifications from domain experts.
For changes to documents in regulated sectors, we produce institutional-level analysis including regulatory exposure mapping (GDPR, CCPA, CPRA, HIPAA, FTC, SEC, FINRA, and other applicable frameworks), enforcement history context where publicly available, and comparison to peer platforms' approaches. This analysis is intended to support — not replace — legal and compliance review.
Every record in the ConductAtlas archive has a stable identifier suitable for citation in legal filings, academic research, and regulatory submissions. These IDs are permanent and never reassigned.
These identifiers can be used in legal filings, research citations, and regulatory submissions. Every public page on ConductAtlas displays the relevant record ID, and our API returns these identifiers in all responses.
We believe in transparency about limitations. ConductAtlas is a young project and our coverage is uneven.
If you identify an error — a misclassification, an outdated capture, a missing provision, a factual inaccuracy in our analysis — email contact@conductatlas.com. We investigate corrections promptly and, where appropriate, annotate the record with a correction note preserving the original and updated state.
For transparency about the systems that process your data and our archive:
Full details of how we handle your personal data are in our Privacy Policy.
ConductAtlas is independent. We are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by any of the platforms we track. Platform names and marks are property of their respective owners. We do not receive compensation from platforms for coverage, and no platform has editorial control over our analysis.
Our business model is subscription-based: free for individuals, paid tiers for professionals and institutions. We do not monetize through advertising, data brokerage, or platform partnerships.
Academic researchers, journalists, nonprofit advocacy organizations, and public-interest projects can request free or discounted access to ConductAtlas. Email contact@conductatlas.com with a brief description of your use case.
For methodology questions, corrections, coverage requests, or research partnerships: contact@conductatlas.com.
This methodology document is itself versioned. As our processes evolve, we update this page and record the update date. Suggestions for improvement are welcome.