ABSTRACT
The terms of use (TOUs) of major digital platforms are among the most prolific contracts in human history, yet their evolution over time remains largely unexamined. Efforts to study change in digital contracts are hindered by their ephemeral nature and the scarcity of publicly available data. This paper introduces the Longitudinal Digital Terms Corpus (LDT Corpus), a curated and comprehensive time series of 861 TOUs for fifty prominent digital platforms from 1999 to 2025. We analyze the LDT Corpus with an interdisciplinary toolkit that combines corpus linguistics with recent advances in natural language processing. Our results show that digital TOUs are highly plastic: they change frequently and often extensively. While expanding substantially in length, TOUs maintain consistently high levels of linguistic complexity over time. We also highlight patterns of textual convergence among TOUs by corporate affiliation. By making the LDT Corpus and our code publicly available, we offer new tools and data for research on contract change.
Samples, Tim and Ireland, Katherine and Beelen, Kaspar, Introducing a New Longitudinal Corpus of Digital Contracts, 1999-2025 (May 5, 2026).
Leave a Reply