ToS;DR — TL;DR for Terms of Service and Privacy Policy

I'd be very careful counting the requirements for cookies as a bad thing (as seen in the github section):<p>First-Party session cookies are a totally valid use of cookies and actually help improving the security in that a session-id in a cookie will never be copy &#38; pasted by accident (it happens to URL-based session-id's at times) and cookies can be marked as both httponly and secure, making it more difficult to impossible (depending on browser) to XSS the session-id away.<p>As such I would actually go as far as to <i>prefer</i> a site that requires (first-party session) cookies to one that doesn't.

Great concept and smart execution.<p>A suggestion - rather than rating "A" through "E" why not change to the more recognizable (for US audience at least) scale of "A through F" (A/B/C/D/F) which we're all mercilessly trained to recognize through years of school grades?<p>"E" as your worst rating confused me at first glance - could be interpreted as "Excellent"

An API and chrome addon would be very nice. I wouldn't check the site, but I would like warnings when I accessed the registration page of a bad website.

Suggestion: Include a "Under EU Data Protection law: all/some/none" category.<p>Companies in the EU, are required to do various things under EU data protection law. E.g. they are legally required to protect your personal data, they can only use the personal data for things you agreed to, they must tell you what data they keep on you if you ask, if they are wrong and you tell them, they are legally required to update the data, there is a national body that is legally empowered to tell a company to stop doing a thing/delete data if they are in breech of data protection law, if they suffer a data breech they are legally required to inform users, etc. All of these things are good for users.<p>Some companies (e.g. those entirely in the USA) are not bound by these. Some companies (e.g. those entirely in the EU) are bound by this. Some companies (e.g. Facebook) say "If you're in the US or Canada, you're under US law, if you're anyone else, you're under EU law".

Seems a bit biased in places. One of the example sites has a big scary red X next to "Deleted images are not really deleted", despite that being an important feature for any site that lets users delete their own content.<p>It's one of those tradeoffs you make where you trade a tiny fraction of risk (e.g., that somebody might break into your system and steal the exact cat photo that one high profile blogger was embarrassed to have uploaded) so that you can have an easy fix for the dozens of emails you get each month from people who accidentally deleted the wrong photo and can't believe you deleted it even though I told you to and I'll sue you because that's ILLEGAL!<p>Definitely not worthy of a big red X against your site, since it's the only sensible choice.

Some of these are a bit <i>too</i> terse. e.g. 500px says "Ownership". What does that mean? And why is it less worrying than twitpic's "Takes credit for your content"? (And how does that make sense? Twitpic puts the username of the uploader on each page, no?)

It seems idealistic, but a service like this would be incredibly insightful. I only "read" (read: skim) the TOS of a select few companies (Apple, for one), so the high-level summaries shown on this landing page are immensely valuable (though the scoring system seems obtuse). Of course, now one has to worry about the objectivity of the summarizers.

This seems like a VERY good idea! Even when i take the time to read the TOS on sites (granted, it is rare), i come away unsure that i really understand it.<p>This seems like an excellent way to deal with this issue too!<p>Thanks ToS;DR!

Fantastic to have. It is really hard for companies to offer simply legal terms, since any simplification starts to undermine the actual detailed terms. Awesome to have this from a third party.<p>I imagine this would be particularly valuable as a browser extension.

Given the purpose of the site and it's broad potential reach (and the fact that it's not a domain that requires pushing the envelope in terms of rich user experience), I was pretty suprised to see that the entire 'Rated Services' section was a giant white block in Internet Explorer 9.<p>I could understand lack of support for IE7 (or perhaps crappy formatting), would raise an eyebrow at lack of support for IE8 (given the nature of the domain and that there's no compelling reason for a lack of graceful fallback in this case), but lack of IE9 support is a bit... suprising.<p>I certainly hope the team plans on addressing this, otherwise you're cutting a large chunk of browser users out of the picture for (from what I can see) no compelling reason related to the technical requirements of the kind of content you are delivering.

I understand that the project welcomes contributions, but who has the final say on the rating of a website? Are there any gate-keepers, and who are they?

I attempted a similar feat in 2010 with the now defunct tosgrok.com. This is a very needed service!<p>Edit: Take the domain and put it to good use, I no longer own it and it beats tos;dr!

For those who have decent experience in machine learning (and NLP) and its theoretical foundations...isn't there enough examples of TOS and conventions of the "art" that a classifier could be built to determine restrictiveness and such? Not completely accurate, but even something that's 60% right would be a huge help to services like the OP's

I haven't read through all the comments but standardized and unbiased copy writing would really benefit the site. "Promise to inform about data requests" gets a plus while "No transparency on law enforcement requests" get a minus.<p>Both labels could be changed to "Notification of data requests", and a user would have the benefit of knowing you were comparing the same thing across multiple sites.<p>As it stands it's hard to compare a sites rating.<p>Another (possibly more prominent) example: Github has "You don't grant any copyright license to github", right below that SoundCloud has "You stay in control of your copyright", and below that 500px simply has "Ownership".<p>Assuming those all refer to the same thing (owning your data/copyright), a simple, "Copyright ownership" would be much clearer and unbiased copy.

Gravatar: No Right to leave the service. Really?

Great initiative. Can the mere length of a TOS and it's complexity be a factor in the rating too? The crowd here may be able to somewhat grasp the legalese in a TOS. It's not fair to expect that from any normal visitor.

This is a very convenient service for the users, but it might raise some issues if any of these terms are ever argued in court. Defending that you read the ToS;DR and not the terms of service might not hold much water.

This has the potential to be a great educational tool and hopefully in time will reach a wide audience.<p>If enough people are aware of the terms it will exert pressure on providers to be more open and reasonable with their terms.<p>Of course whilst many free services might argue they have more leeway in imposing stricter terms, this still doesn't justify certain treatment of users.<p>Providing a summary of terms in a standardised manner will also make it much clearer where one particular service deviates in an unreasonable fashion.<p>In particular, user data and usage of third party cookies would be two categories where it would be good to get visibility.

Given how open source projects are increasingly using GitHub as the canonical repository, I'm a bit disappointed that they can refuse you service for any reason at all. I want to believe that the GH guys are good people and were just lazy here.<p>So, +1 for tos-dr for letting me know, and a potential extra +1 if they help us get GH to change this policy. I'm going to let them know this matters to me, I hope others here will as well.

I like the idea and the layout is nice.<p>That being said, use the same categories for each company, don't re-write the description based on how good/bad it is. It would be far more useful for creating a table (which would also be a great way to organize this information, businesses looking to improve the transparency of their ToS would need only look at top scored candidates to find inspiration).

I love the color coding, makes it easy to see at a glance.<p>What's the plan as terms of service change over time? Some greens might become redundant.

This is awesome! It would be cool if this could be turned into a browser plugin so you could see what class site you're visiting.

I have been thinking about doing something similar for quite sometime now. Specifically I wanted to build a browser extension that highlights only the important parts of agreement. And the important points will in turn be decided by the community of users with the system keeping track of different versions of agreements and data of interest in it.

Great idea - similar to my website that got frontpaged a few weeks ago (www.tldrlegal.com). Very well done; I will definitely be using this in the future.

This is a side topic related (so sorry for the threadjack!):<p>Does anyone else think TL;DR is a terrible replacement for "Abriged:" or "Summary:"?

While checking this out I wondered whether there exists a service for generating ToS. Does that exist?

Yay! This I have been waiting for.

Would love an extension that showed a summary of a site's ToS on the sign-up page.

This is awesome.

Too long introduction; didn't Read

My preferred ToS:<p>Be nice.

Still don't want to read it.