On the first day of a university course, several hundred students asked to line up and sign a two page agreement in order to access computing resources necessary for the course. When my turn came, I asked where I could read it without holding up the entire line. They were shocked that anyone would ask such a question, though they provided me a space to read over the document.<p>If blindly signing a contract one of the first things that computer science students encounter, I'm not surprised that they simply put up those ToS without the expectation that they will be read.
If a website knows I didn't <i>really</i> read a contract, can they claim I am bound by it?<p>I like to hope that the <i>time-spent-reading</i> is logged somewhere. Should it come up in court, Website.com would be required to disclose their logs which would show that I spent all of 1.35s reading their terms and conditions, most of which was spent scrolling.<p>Another puerile hack of mine is to sign a document with the name "I do not agree" and then press accept, and see if they agreed to let me use the service anyway.
Ages ago I installed a shareware product. And it also had a scrollable "terms and condition" screen (about 2 pages long) when starting it for the first time. When you clicked the "I Agree" button too quickly it would ask you "Do you really agree to the terms you read in only 0.76 seconds?"
I think we need some universal standards for ToS. The same way we have some visual rating signs for movies and video games. Most of it should be regular and easy to categories. And there should be a separate rating for how many irregular terms are in there.
It's all farcical, but it's pervasive because of the lawyers I guess. Even a supposedly design-first-consumer-friendly company like Apple has walls of tiny text to scroll through.<p>If only Terms of Services could be upgraded to:<p>1. A simple, plain English/local language explanation in bullet points of what the software will be doing. Like how you would explain it to your parents.<p>2. A link to the legalese, so that covers the legal requirements?<p>If I recall correctly, Stripe is one company whereby the Terms of Service tries to explain things to you clearly. That's certainly a start, but this would be an interesting thing to improve on and solve. Maybe a GPT-2/GPT-3 application? Tell me simply what this block of text means?
Yes, this is a big problem. In fact, in May 2019, I mad a semi-serious post about it (<a href="https://notdaily.com/blog/2019/05/05/you-are-a-liar-yes-you/" rel="nofollow">https://notdaily.com/blog/2019/05/05/you-are-a-liar-yes-you/</a>)<p>My major concern is the normalization of lying: the craziness of "I have read and accept..." makes liars out of all of us.<p>So I applaud the tosdr effort, but I don't believe it is addressing the real problem.
I remember reading my bank's ToS at the time I was just out of the school. I read the whole piece, printed in font size 4 and the conclusion was like this: no matter what happens, it's my fault.<p>It doesn't matter what the TOCs are if they are presented at a gun point: a lot of services don't have alternatives and as much as I wouldn't cry for losing access to Reddit or YouTube,for some that would be the case.
Thought experiment: can we have a standard TOS for centralized services?<p>Building the next Facebook? Legally bind yourself that you'll always provide API access and this right cannot ever be taken away to the extent permitted by the law.<p>Maybe we need a standardization for centralized service TOS like MIT/GPL etc are for OSS. So people can decide more easily which centralized services to use.
The team recently did an AMA on reddit: <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/kogsuw/we_are_terms_of_service_didnt_read_ask_us_anything/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/kogsuw/we_are_term...</a>
I think the compromise to TOS type things is they can only be limited to a list of house rules that you can enforce with or without an agreement, kind of like booting off a rowdy customer off of the property of your retail store. Like, ‘here are the rules’ and that is about it.
Their scored system seems flawed. For example, both Facebook and Reddit have the same "E" score, while Facebook requires you to disclose your real identity and to link your phone, and Reddit doesn't. They are worlds away with regard to privacy.
Sidenote: This is how you properly deal with massive load on your site: <a href="https://imgur.com/a/zKMh5zg" rel="nofollow">https://imgur.com/a/zKMh5zg</a><p>The "checkout our twitter" thing is especially cool.
Educational settings are one of the worst places where insidious terms crop up. You often simply don't have a choice.<p>I'm a volunteer firefighter and was registered by my department to take a course with a government-run institution to upgrade my certification.<p>A while back that institution began using Blackboard - a Netherlands company - for all learning materials, whose ToS [1] includes a clause where I must agree to <i>defend and indemnify</i> Blackboard <i>from and against any and all claims, damages, obligations, losses, liabilities, costs or debt, and expenses (including but not limited to attorney's fees) arising from</i> my <i>use of and access to</i> their product, as well as <i>any other party's access and use</i> of the product with my username or password (which I contemplate could occur if Blackboard or the institution were to suffer a data breach).<p>To read the textbook (only available online) there was a similar ToS from yet another third party. You can't access any of the material without explicitly agreeing to both contracts.<p>I was uncomfortable with the clause. For one, I didn't understand why my interaction with my local government institution required me to indemnify two foreign companies with whom I have zero relation (and didn't want any).
Before "cloud services", the institution would have contracted with the vendors themselves to buy the platform, then presented their <i>own</i> contract to me (which is the right way to do this, and which I'd be fine with).<p>I deferred accepting, and reached out to the institution to find out if there was some alternative way to obtain the materials (e.g. in hardcopy). I spent months trying to find alternative arrangements, but the bottom line was nobody cared.<p>I showed it to a commercial lawyer in the department who agreed the clause is nonsensical and he expressed some choice words for the institution foisting this upon its students.<p>I give of my own time and volition do firefighting and rescue (and love doing so!). Nobody was paying me to take this course.<p>In the end I wound up hitting the Accept button, with a deep feeling of having effectively been bullied into it.<p>Compared to some of the other ToS's I've seen out there this one was comparatively mild. I can only imagine how parents must feel when such garbage finds its way into their kids' learning environments.<p>[1] <a href="https://help.blackboard.com/Terms_of_Use" rel="nofollow">https://help.blackboard.com/Terms_of_Use</a> and <a href="https://tosdr.org/en/service/2230" rel="nofollow">https://tosdr.org/en/service/2230</a>
Here's a graph showing how long it would take to read the ToS of some prominent companies:
<a href="https://i.redd.it/j6cd57dbrga61.png" rel="nofollow">https://i.redd.it/j6cd57dbrga61.png</a>
I frequently get mails from banks and other service providers with subject lines like 'changes to our agreement'. I don't read those either. Mind you, it might be fun to send a few unilateral changes back their way, detailed in a suitably upbeat or condescending letter.
Then the second biggest lie is:<p><i>We use cookies to give you the best experience on our website. If you continue to use this site we will assume you are happy with it. [Ok] [No] [Privacy Policy]</i><p>Actual text from the www.gdpr.eu cookie consent pop-up. =)
>Yep, we use cookies as well and we have to show it to you as we are based in Germany, sorry folks!<p>Following one law and breaking another by not having a No button (only a link to duckduckgo.com under "get my out of here"). Not sure I trust someone to explain me Terms if they don't understand it themselves.