soco-bot
Reading privacy policies on behalf of consumers.
Why soco-bot exists
Every time people shop online, they are asked to accept a privacy policy and terms of service. Almost nobody reads them. They are long, they change often, and they are hard to follow.
soco (The Sovereign Consumer) is a consumer app. Our users ask soco to do this reading for them. soco-bot reads these pages on behalf of soco's users and future users, the way each of them would if they had the time. soco then explains, in plain words, how each shop or brand protects their personal data. Users set their own privacy preferences and choose where to shop with those in mind.
soco-bot is the program that does the reading.
What soco-bot reads, and what it does not do
It reads
- Privacy policies and privacy notices
- State privacy notices, for example a California or Virginia notice
- Cookie policies
- Children's privacy pages
- Consumer health data notices
- Notices of financial incentive
- Terms of service and terms of use
It does not
- Read product pages, prices, reviews or customer accounts
- Sign in, fill in forms, add items to a cart or click ads
- Collect personal data about anyone
- Use proxies, rotate IP addresses or pretend to be a person
- Try to get past CAPTCHAs, logins or security checks. If your site blocks it, it stops.
To find these pages, it may also read your home page, your sitemap and the links in your page footer.
How soco-bot behaves
- Rarely. About once a month for each page, to see if the page has changed.
- Slowly. One request at a time to your site, with a pause between requests.
- Like a reader. Some policy pages show their text only after the page loads, or hide sections behind "+" or "Read more" buttons. For these pages, soco-bot may open the page in a browser and open those sections, just as a person would. It does nothing else on the page.
- robots.txt first. Before it visits, it reads your robots.txt and follows it, including any Crawl-delay you set.
Who is responsible for soco-bot
soco-bot acts for consumers, but it is soco's program, and soco answers for it. A named person at soco is responsible for how it behaves.
The custodian:
- makes sure soco-bot follows the rules on this page;
- answers questions and complaints from website owners;
- handles requests to stop, slow down or change what soco-bot reads;
- reviews disputes about which page soco read or what it said.
Please contact the custodian through the email address below, not personally.
How to recognise soco-bot
User-agent
soco-bot/1.0 (+https://soco-bot.thesovereignconsumer.com)
IP address
soco-bot visits only from this address:
48.216.151.106
Check it yourself
Anyone can copy our user-agent text. To be sure a visit is really from soco, check the IP address both ways:
nslookup 48.216.151.106 → soco-bot.thesovereignconsumer.com nslookup soco-bot.thesovereignconsumer.com → 48.216.151.106
If both answers match, the visit is from soco-bot. If they don't, it isn't us.
How to block or limit soco-bot
Add lines to the robots.txt file on your site.
Block soco-bot completely
User-agent: soco-bot Disallow: /
Allow only your privacy and terms pages
User-agent: soco-bot Allow: /privacy Allow: /terms Disallow: /
Slow it down (seconds between requests)
User-agent: soco-bot Crawl-delay: 30
soco-bot reads robots.txt again before each visit, so changes apply within a day.
Please note: if you block soco-bot, soco may still use copies of your policy pages from public web archives, such as the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. When we do, we show the date of the archived copy.
How to allow soco-bot
If your security service blocks soco-bot by mistake, you can allow it in your firewall or bot settings. Use both our IP address and our user-agent. Many services also let you limit the rule to your policy pages only.
What we keep
For each page, we keep:
- the text of the page;
- its web address;
- the date we read it;
- a digital fingerprint (a code that changes if the text changes).
This is our record of what the page said on that date. Scores are based on that record. soco users may see short quotes from your policy next to your score, so they can see where a score came from.
Think we got something wrong?
If your policy has changed, or you think we read the wrong page, write to us. Tell us the right web address. The custodian will make sure we read it again and check.
Contact
Email: [CONTACT EMAIL]
We reply within [5 working days].