matrix-spec-proposals/proposals/1692-terms-at-registration.md

MSC1692: Terms of service at registration

At registration, homeservers may wish to require the user to accept a given set of policy documents, such as a terms of service and privacy policy. There may be many different types of documents, all of which are versioned and presented in (potentially) multiple languages.

This proposal covers requiring users to accept the list of documents during registration. Future improvements could include informing the user after registration that a document has changed, which has been spun out to MSC3012.

Proposal

The User-Interactive Authentication API (UIA) is currently used during registration to create a new account. In future, it is expected that OIDC will be used instead, which can include support for this MSC's principles without needing to change the Matrix specification itself. As a measure until OIDC is here though, this MSC exists to fill the need.

A new m.login.terms authentication type is introduced, allowing servers to include it in registration flows if it desires. Servers which do not require policy acceptance at registration are not required to support this flow.

The parameters for the new authentication type look like the following:

{
    "policies": {
        "terms_of_service": {
            "version": "1.2",
            "en": {
                "name": "Terms of Service",
                "url": "https://example.org/somewhere/terms-1.2-en.html"
            },
            "fr": {
                "name": "Conditions d'utilisation",
                "url": "https://example.org/somewhere/terms-1.2-fr.html"
            }
        },
        "privacy_policy": {
            "version": "1.2",
            "en": {
                "name": "Privacy Policy",
                "url": "https://example.org/somewhere/privacy-1.2-en.html"
            },
            "fr": {
                "name": "Politique de confidentialité",
                "url": "https://example.org/somewhere/privacy-1.2-fr.html"
            }
        }
    }
}

Each key under policies is a "Policy ID", and defined by the server. They are an opaque identifier (described later in this proposal). Each policy object associated with the policy ID has a required version as a convenience to the client, and is another opaque identifier. All other keys are language codes to represent the same document. The client picks the language which best suits the user.

Language codes should be formatted as per Section 2.2 of RFC 5646, noting that some implementation may use an underscore instead of dash. For example, en_US instead of en-US. This recommendation is to ensure maximum compatibility with existing conventions around language choices in (Matrix) clients.

name and url for each policy document are required, and are arbitrary strings with no maximum length. url must be a valid URI with scheme https:// or http://. Insecure HTTP is discouraged.

If a client encounters an invalid parameter, registration should stop with an error presented to the user.

To complete the stage, accepting all of the listed documents, the client submits an empty auth dict. The client should present the user with a checkbox to accept each policy, including a link to the provided url, or otherwise rely on fallback auth.

The server is expected to track which document versions it presented to the user during registration, if applicable.

Opaque identifier

This definition is inherited from MSC1597.

Opaque IDs must be strings consisting entirely of the characters [0-9a-zA-Z._~-]. Their length must not exceed 255 characters and they must not be empty.

Unstable prefix

Regrettably, this MSC was implemented with stable identifiers before an unstable identifiers process was established. Implementation has existed in some capacity since 2018: https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/pull/4004

Noting that the modern MSC process forbids such behaviour, new implementations should use the stable m.login.terms identifier regardless of MSC status. If the MSC changes in a breaking way, a new identifier must be chosen, and must include a proper unstable prefix.