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ToS;DR — TL;DR for Terms of Service and Privacy Policy
- milesskorpen 14y agoFantastic 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. I imagine this would be particularly valuable as a browser extension.
- jancborchardt 14y agoGood news: a first version of the Chrome/Chromium extension works! If you’d like to try it out you have to install it yourself at the moment, it’s pretty easy though: https://github.com/unhosted/ToS-DR/issues/11#issuecomment-7665593 https://github.com/unhosted/ToS-DR/issues/11#issuecomment-76...
- lhnz 14y agoAn 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.
- bergie 14y agoAgreed. This seems like something Mozilla should also get behind. I'd love to see this sort of information as part of the site identity dialog, which now only has SSL certificate details. Update: I guess this could be used as an API of sorts: https://raw.github.com/unhosted/ToS-DR/gh-pages/points.json https://raw.github.com/unhosted/ToS-DR/gh-pages/points.json
- benatkin 14y agoI noticed that it's under the AGPL. That might be an issue for developing a Chrome plugin.
- hugoroy 14y agoAGPL is our JS+HTML+CSS code. The data itself (JSON) is CC-BY-SA.
- altarelli 14y agowould it be possible to add ixquick and webchat.freenode you suggest?
- jancborchardt 14y agoAaand a first version of the Chrome plugin is done. Install and try it out: https://github.com/unhosted/ToS-DR/issues/11#issuecomment-7665593 https://github.com/unhosted/ToS-DR/issues/11#issuecomment-76... PS: hey Ben!
- darkpicnic 14y agotossos.com was built about 6 months ago. Trying to do similar things as this. It has a Chrome Plugin... check it out.
- hugoroy 14y agoYes. I have been in touch with the author and invited to cooperate. But... where is the code? how does it work exactly? How can it interoperate with other projects trying to back up archives of terms? etc. etc.
- jancborchardt 14y agoWe now also have a first version of the Chrome extension ready to try out: https://github.com/unhosted/ToS-DR/issues/11#issuecomment-7665593 https://github.com/unhosted/ToS-DR/issues/11#issuecomment-76... Let us know what you think!
- ajhai 14y agoI 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.
- hugoroy 14y agoThere's an issue for that. https://github.com/unhosted/ToS-DR/issues/11 https://github.com/unhosted/ToS-DR/issues/11
- baseh 14y agoThis is a great idea. The extension can be something like DIIGO does - highlight parts of the agreements that are deemed important or critical to consumer + provide snapshots of the TOS/Privacy policy whenever there are changes.
- jancborchardt 14y agoHeads up – we have a first version of the Chrome extension ready to try out: https://github.com/unhosted/ToS-DR/issues/11#issuecomment-7665593 https://github.com/unhosted/ToS-DR/issues/11#issuecomment-76...
- jancborchardt 14y agoWe now have a first version of the Chrome/Chromium extension working! Feel free to install it and let us know what you think: https://github.com/unhosted/ToS-DR/issues/11#issuecomment-7665593 https://github.com/unhosted/ToS-DR/issues/11#issuecomment-76...
- kibwen 14y agoIt 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.
- hugoroy 14y agoYes, trust is one problem. I think we're being objective (at least we are trying, with building a scoring system that's automatic). But for sure, we are not being neutral. We do think that tracking should always be opt-in, not opt-out. At least, we're working in total transparency and it's an open process. I hope that helps.
- kibwen 14y agoRe: neutrality, I'm delighted to see that your perspectives align with mine. Dubious legal terms deserve to be called out. And the transparency is nice, but... well, if I'm too lazy to read a 50-page legal document, I hope I don't have to sift through a 50-page mailing list thread just to establish confidence in the summary of the document itself. :)
- chrismonsanto 14y agoShouldn't be much of a problem if the summaries quote relevant passages. You can just Ctrl-F and see if your intuition agrees with theirs.
- luckyeights 14y agoThank you so much for offering this service! I think the transparency is extremely important, and I am impressed with your execution so far.
- LesZedCB 14y agoHow about a TOS Wiki?
- ldayley 14y agoI attempted a similar feat in 2010 with the now defunct tosgrok.com. This is a very needed service! Edit: Take the domain and put it to good use, I no longer own it and it beats tos;dr!
- thetabyte 14y agoTo be fair, neither is exactly terminology familiar with the average user, who I think they're trying to reach out to here. Both are clever, but known mostly by avid Internet users or nerds.
- ldayley 14y agoCertainly. But I think people who care what provisions the TOS of a service contain are the exception and not the average person.
- thetabyte 14y agoI think one of the goals with providing brief, easy to read summaries can (and should) be expanding the number of people who care what is in the TOS.
- graue 14y agoI think ToS;DR is less nerdy. "Grok" makes me visualize gray-bearded Unix programmers, but young internet-savvy people of all stripes know what TL;DR means. Didn't 4chan popularize that abbreviation?
- elmindreda 14y agoYay! This I have been waiting for.
- maxko87 14y agoThis 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.
- breckinloggins 14y agoI think the main value here is not in court, it's giving people a better "bird's eye view" of how a service treats you and your data. From this point, you might decide: - To cancel the service - To not join in the first place - To raise a collective stink about something onerous in the terms Any of these things, in high numbers, could force a service provider to update their TOS to be more friendly. That's a pretty good outcome even if saying "but the ToS;DR said!!!" would never hold up in court or anywhere else.
- beernutz 14y agoThis 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. This seems like an excellent way to deal with this issue too! Thanks ToS;DR!
- bezaorj 14y agoBrilliant idea!
- aresant 14y agoGreat concept and smart execution. 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? "E" as your worst rating confused me at first glance - could be interpreted as "Excellent"
- arnarbi 14y agoI'm not from the US, but doesn't F have a different meaning than A-D? I.e. it means you failed and have to do the test/project/whatever again? A-E is logical I'd say.
- atacrawl 14y agoI went to high school in Virginia where a failing grade was an E.
- lovskogen 14y agoI vouch for a more international 5-star system.
- hugoroy 14y agoactually the original inspiration was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_energy_label https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_energy_label
- TazeTSchnitzel 14y ago
- sp332 14y agoSome of these are a bit too 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?)
- reustle 14y agoIf you click on "Read the Details", you will see a bit of text under each point. Ownership: The copyright license you grant to 500px is transferable and sublicensable. The copyright license is limited for use “in connection with the Services” which includes promotional uses and redistribution “to other parties, web-sites, applications, and other entities” if you are credited properly. The license on your content terminates when you remove such content.
- jonny_eh 14y agoWhile checking this out I wondered whether there exists a service for generating ToS. Does that exist?
- hugoroy 14y agoYes. https://github.com/flamsmark/privacy-policy-template https://github.com/flamsmark/privacy-policy-template & http://blog.docracy.com/post/27931026976/an-open-source-privacy-policy-for-mobile-apps http://blog.docracy.com/post/27931026976/an-open-source-priv...
- joeblau 14y agoThis 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.
- jancborchardt 14y agoA first version of the Chrome extension is ready to try out. Feel free to install it and let us know what you think! :) https://github.com/unhosted/ToS-DR/issues/11#issuecomment-7665593 https://github.com/unhosted/ToS-DR/issues/11#issuecomment-76...
- brador 14y agoI love the color coding, makes it easy to see at a glance. What's the plan as terms of service change over time? Some greens might become redundant.
- hugoroy 14y agoThe plan is to work with the EFF's tosback https://github.com/pde/tosback2 https://github.com/pde/tosback2 (they need contributors too BTW) and track changes over time so we can notify people when something wrong is going on (they'd be able to subscribe to a list of services' ToS;DR)
- ldng 14y agoThey should use V8 to fetch TOS so that Facebook don't get away with its latest TOS change. http://www.tosback.org/diff.php?vid=1740 http://www.tosback.org/diff.php?vid=1740 Yes, it's in Javascript so not crawlable by TOSBack. The TOS is obfuscated to ... protect its privacy ? So ironic coming from those who claim privacy is dead.
- hugoroy 14y agotosback.org is no longer updated. Yes, the facebook TOS are difficult to archive: http://wayback.archive.org/web/*/http://www.facebook.com/legal/privacy http://wayback.archive.org/web/*/http://www.facebook.com/leg... issue on GH if you have a solution: https://github.com/pde/tosback2-data/issues/1 https://github.com/pde/tosback2-data/issues/1
- kno 14y agoGravatar: No Right to leave the service. Really?
- hugoroy 14y agoYes. Which is a bit silly, I haven't really understood their justification for it. But if they want to clear that up, it would be a good idea.
- borlak 14y agorandom gripe: if you use a different email on gravatar than on github, your gravatar wont show up on github. it's becoming pretty standard, especially among techies, to have a unique email per site, so you can easily tell if a site is selling your address (or is a victim of a hack, like dropbox was). I emailed them about it -- too bad!
- Flimm 14y agoYou could register your different email again with Gravatar.
- solsenNet 14y agoStill don't want to read it.
- Flimm 14y agoI 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?
- hugoroy 14y agoFor the moment: Anyone who can push to the 5apps.com git master branch. That is people at http://unhosted.org http://unhosted.org We would be happy to get th umbrella of a non profit org like Mozilla or the EFF. Any way, if you don't like our decision: you can get involved. Or you can fork it.
- Flimm 14y agoIf this site gets big, its neutrality will be questioned, and you've got to be ready with answers. I don't want to see good efforts like these go to waste.
- danso 14y agoFor 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
- rmc 14y agoSuggestion: Include a "Under EU Data Protection law: all/some/none" category. 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. 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".
- hugoroy 14y agoYes. Differences between legislations is one thing that's making the task harder. I think it's better to focus to what the terms actually state. But I always keep in mind the jurisdiction under which the company operates as it can influence the meaning of the terms. However I'd fear to get to the other extreme and to end up making a rating system saying which legislation is better than the other. It's not the scope. One other thing: we think the terms should be self-explanatory. I don't think services should expect their users to know the EU data protection law. So it would seem smart for me that the services makes a statement about them in their terms (just like they state details about their security practices for instance).
- Flimm 14y agoShouldn't "Defending your privacy in US Congress" be out of scope as well, then? It certainly isn't part of a website's terms and conditions. Plus, it's hard to judge how well those activities are going, and how committed the company is in pursuing those activities in the future.
- hugoroy 14y agoYou're right. I was actually unsure at the time. The data comes from the EFF.
- chrismonsanto 14y agoGiven 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. 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.
- a3_nm 14y ago> I'm a bit disappointed that they can refuse you service for any reason at all. This is actually a problem with the methodology (I think): most probably, none of the service providers pledge to provide service to you, so they can all refuse service for any reason. Github should probably get credit because at least they are honest about it.
- hugoroy 14y agoThat's a fair point. You can discuss this at https://groups.google.com/d/topic/tosdr/hI5Too_uDVk/discussion https://groups.google.com/d/topic/tosdr/hI5Too_uDVk/discussi... I'll be happy to reply over there :) (if we spread the discussion too much, it will be lost)
- jasonkester 14y agoSeems 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. 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! Definitely not worthy of a big red X against your site, since it's the only sensible choice.
- hugoroy 14y agoYou're welcome to discuss this specific point at https://groups.google.com/d/topic/tosdr/b6ryqY9NdMw/discussion https://groups.google.com/d/topic/tosdr/b6ryqY9NdMw/discussi... Since all Twitpic does is hosting public pictures for Tweets, I would assume as a user that if I click "Delete" then the pictures would be… well. Deleted. Having a short period to rescue the picture from a back up would be acceptable. I don't understand your example with the "high profile blogger".
- simonbrown 14y agoThey could let you delete deleted items permanently, like Dropbox does. Storing data you uploaded with no way to delete it does have privacy implications, since it may be looked at by people working there and could be a lot more sensitive than a cat photo. I'd say a term that is more unfairly given a thumbs down is giving them a license to user content, since it's impractical to operate a user-generated content site without this.
- hugoroy 14y agoI agree. But sometimes the copyright license conceded by the user goes way beyond what's needed for the service. Why do you give rights to sublicense and to transfer to Facebook or Twitter? Details: http://tos-dr.info/topics.html#copyright-scope http://tos-dr.info/topics.html#copyright-scope
- pilif 14y agoI'd be very careful counting the requirements for cookies as a bad thing (as seen in the github section): 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 & 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. As such I would actually go as far as to prefer a site that requires (first-party session) cookies to one that doesn't.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- hugoroy 14y agoThanks for your feedback. The whole explanation can be found about cookies can be found here. Tell us what you think! http://tos-dr.info/topics.html#cookies http://tos-dr.info/topics.html#cookies > 5 GitHub requires cookies 5: means it's a low score. So it's considered bad, but it doesn't influence very much the whole class of GitHub. > GitHub requires cookies to work and misleads you to > believe that you remain anonymous while cookies contain > “unique identifiers”. However, only session cookies are > used, not persistant cookies. The whole discussion is here https://groups.google.com/d/topic/tosdr/gyMiAkV5ZG0/discussion https://groups.google.com/d/topic/tosdr/gyMiAkV5ZG0/discussi... Do you agree/disagree? We welcome contributions!
- Lockyy 14y agoUrl based session ids led to me finding a quite substantial security hole in a popular games mod website that allowed me to modify and delete my mods without being logged in. Also was able to view my own download history, potentially very embarrassing for some people. So yes, I can testify that in this websites case their use of session ids in the url during a website renovation (where people were posting their urls on the forums to help fix bugs) led to a lot of people being made vulnerable. I just wish they'd at least thanked me for informing them of the vulnerability...
- grabeh 14y agoThis has the potential to be a great educational tool and hopefully in time will reach a wide audience. If enough people are aware of the terms it will exert pressure on providers to be more open and reasonable with their terms. 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. Providing a summary of terms in a standardised manner will also make it much clearer where one particular service deviates in an unreasonable fashion. In particular, user data and usage of third party cookies would be two categories where it would be good to get visibility.
- XiZhao 14y agoGreat 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.
- cloudsteam 14y agoyou have a good site, shame this one came out too (for you!)
- shock3naw 14y agoI like the idea and the layout is nice. 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).
- wildtype 14y agoToo long introduction; didn't Read
- allardschip 14y agoGreat 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.
- mrkeyboard 14y agoWow, this is great! I love it. Hold on, no. I hate this. This reflects what I try so hard not to be - a lazy reader. Let me explain this reaction: The execution lacks the huge opportunity to make me, and many others, actually read the ToS we often so easily agree to. I realize there's a reference in every bullet, but it's not enough. The interface (linking to Google Groups) is terrible and not encouraging. This is a start, but I'd argue it should serve for a greater purpose. An educational purpose, considering even us nerds tend not to read ToS. It's a lot to do with the fact we read less in the era of Hacker News (quite surprisingly - and you know I'm right), we want everything summarized. Optimize our time. But that's off topic.
- BobPalmer 14y agoGiven 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. 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. 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.
- zvrba 14y agoWhen I first loaded the page, I was unsure about whether they have no sites, i.e., whether they're just showing a proof of concept. The text said they were planning to review ToS of major sites by middle of july, so that prompted me to fire up Opera. If somebody wonders why I want to use IE9: easily configurable and non-obtrusive, BUILT-IN plugin blockers and ad blockers [+ do-not-track lists].
- michielbdejong 14y agothat's my fault, and was definitely not intended, sorry. thanks for reporting it, i'll make sure it gets fixed somehow.
- michielbdejong 14y agoit should be fixed now hopefully
- hugoroy 14y agothank you very much for reporting this. As we're all working on non-windows systems, we would not have found out by ourselves!
- biftek 14y agoI 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. 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. As it stands it's hard to compare a sites rating. 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". Assuming those all refer to the same thing (owning your data/copyright), a simple, "Copyright ownership" would be much clearer and unbiased copy.
- alpine 14y agoMy preferred ToS: Be nice.
- tomrod 14y agoThis is a side topic related (so sorry for the threadjack!): Does anyone else think TL;DR is a terrible replacement for "Abriged:" or "Summary:"?
- ringe 14y agoThis is awesome.
- kmfrk 14y agoWould love an extension that showed a summary of a site's ToS on the sign-up page.