Terms of Service; Didn't Read

As a non-technical person from a completely different industry, my take on TOS is this: I don&#x27;t care.<p>Why would anyone care? Is it a legal binding contract between me and the comany? No. It might be taken into account if we go into court, but if they have it in their TOS that I bought an elephant from them - it will not hold.<p>If they grant me any rights in their TOS - do I trust them? No. I would never keep data in the cloud without backups. Or have the assumption that my data will be held private.<p>It&#x27;s all just occupational therapy for lawyers.

One of my favorite ToS items is from LinkedIn: You aren&#x27;t allowed to &quot;deep-link to our sites for any purpose, (i.e. creating or posting a link to a LinkedIn web page other than LinkedIn’s home page)&quot;.[1] The act of <i>linking to a publicly available website</i> is against that website&#x27;s terms.<p>[1]<a href="https://www.linkedin.com/legal/user-agreement" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.linkedin.com&#x2F;legal&#x2F;user-agreement</a>

There is a lot of legal stuff that I don&#x27;t understand but one thing in particular stands out: &quot;Terms may be changed any time at their discretion, without notice to the user&quot;. Unless I am missing something, that basically says &quot;we got your signature once, and we can now put it on whatever we like&quot;.

Not really ToS but Ello <a href="https://ello.co/wtf/post/privacy" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ello.co&#x2F;wtf&#x2F;post&#x2F;privacy</a> privacy page is kinda funny to read.<p>On the Information Sharing section it says: Ello does not have any affiliated companies right now. But if we do in the future, we may share information with them, too.<p>But I guess everyone on HN already knew it was nothing but publicity.<p>edit: wrote trello instead of ello

Hello, hugo from tosdr.org here!<p>Just wanted to point out that everything is on <a href="https://github.com/tosdr" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;tosdr</a> and there are easy stuff to work on to help us: <a href="https://github.com/tosdr/tosdr-build/labels/LowHangingFruit" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;tosdr&#x2F;tosdr-build&#x2F;labels&#x2F;LowHangingFruit</a><p>Everything we make is Free Software (and open data) and we’re a not-for-profit.<p>We recently put online: <a href="https://tosdr.org/submit-point.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tosdr.org&#x2F;submit-point.html</a> which is supposed to help increase contributions to the site so that we have more data and more relevant information. Please help us test, debug and contribute :-)<p>One last thing, we’re also running <a href="https://tosback.org/" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tosback.org&#x2F;</a> -- all of this is a lot of work, and we definitely need more contributors :-) (opened another discussion about Tosback: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8396361" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=8396361</a>)

The irony is that they have to say this:<p>&quot;Nothing here should be considered legal advice. We express our opinion with no guarantee and we do not endorse any service in any way. Please refer to a qualified attorney for legal advice. Reading ToS;DR is in no way a replacement for reading the full terms to which you are bound.&quot;<p>Even criticism of legalese requires legalese.

This inspired me to look for HN&#x27;s ToS. As far as I can find, it is &quot;When you click on a link, our server will send you the corresponding page.&quot;<p><a href="http://www.ycombinator.com/legal/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ycombinator.com&#x2F;legal&#x2F;</a><p>Really? That&#x27;s it?

The problem with click-on ToS is that they include heavy handed legalize designed to protect the service provider but for a casual service which is low cost or nearly free to you (they are monetizing you). You certainly would read it (or pay a lawyer to review it) if you were paying someone $100K for engineering work or something like that. It&#x27;s not worth your time for something which is free.<p>A rating service like this actually sounds like a very good idea- even one worth paying a small amount for (they very well will need money to protect themselves from lawsuits due to bad ratings). You pay the rating service about what you pay the web service- almost nothing.<p>Anyway, how else can a class push back against ToS that are not worth reading?

The browser add-on is nice – it adds an icon to the location bar with the overall site rating and makes the info readily accessible by clicking on that icon. It is nice to have a quick assessment of the site&#x27;s TOS as soon right as the page loads.

Up vote, this seems like a great idea to me. I&#x27;d love to see companies get beat up publicly when terms of service are obviously bad. Would also love to see some standardization of privacy&#x2F;content&#x2F;other sub polices.<p>If we&#x27;re all supposed to push our data from an internet of things into the cloud the community needs to hold companies accountable as nobody else is going to. I shudder to think what facebook would be doing right now if it hadn&#x27;t been for public outcry over things like their &quot;Beacon&quot; program.

I like this more for the fact that I get a better idea of what these companies are willing to say publicly about utilizing the data they have on you. TOSes are ultimately meaningless, but comparing sites with things like &quot;your data remains yours&quot; and &quot;your data becomes ours&quot; speaks a lot towards company policy.

Docracy had a great terms of service tracker - it diff&#x27;ed changes to TOS for a thousand companies.<p>Looks like they shut it down last year though. <a href="https://www.docracy.com/tos/changes" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.docracy.com&#x2F;tos&#x2F;changes</a>

I&#x27;m about to launch and I hate ToSs that consist of dense nonsensical boilerplate legalese.<p>Is there anything out there (template or affordable service) to help a website owner construct a sane and simple ToS for their site&#x2F;wepapp?

<a href="https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/terms-of-service-didn’t-r/hjdoplcnndgiblooccencgcggcoihigg/" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chrome.google.com&#x2F;webstore&#x2F;detail&#x2F;terms-of-service-d...</a>

I&#x27;ve heard proposals for standardized icons for TOSs. Kind of like the truth-in-lending statements with credit card offers that spell out everything up front.

<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5888393" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=5888393</a>

Quite frankly most of the comments on that site are very subjective

This has been around for years already.