9 ms·

Terms of Service; Didn't Read

440 points by rfreytag 13y ago

lignuist 13y ago
Any chance to find out, what this is doing, without having to install an extension?
- yareally 13y ago
  Click "ratings" at the top of the page.
- Skalman 13y ago
  Scroll down to see the ratings of some popular sites' ToS. The extension shows you that same rating when visiting a website.
- hobs 13y ago
  I had the same thought, it took me a good twenty seconds of clicking around to figure out "What the hell does it do?"
- jancborchardt 13y ago
  Sorry for the confusion, we’re moving the short description a bit up and in general make it more clear what we do: Rate terms of service of websites. :)
cLeEOGPw 13y ago
I was using it until it required additional rights for some reason. Then I suspected it to be making an online profile and selling it, so I uninstalled it.
- jancborchardt 13y ago
  Jan from ToS;DR here: I’m not sure why it required additional rights, but I can assure you that we’re not selling anything. We are a fully non-profit and open project, if you still have doubts you can read the code to the extensions and install them manually via https://github.com/tosdr/tosdr-firefox https://github.com/tosdr/tosdr-firefox (for Firefox) or https://github.com/tosdr/tosdr-chrome https://github.com/tosdr/tosdr-chrome (for Chrome), and the other browser extensions are also there on Github.
- jancborchardt 13y ago
  FIXED: The additional rights are no longer needed for the Chrome extension, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5890055 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5890055
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
seferphier 13y ago
This is something we really need as consumers. A short summary of essential terms for us to know about. Would be interested in Mobile apps like: Instagram, Vine and Path.
- jancborchardt 13y ago
  We started on Instagram already: http://tosdr.org/#instagram http://tosdr.org/#instagram and will hopefully review it more and give it a class soon. :)
makepanic 13y ago
previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4350907 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4350907 looks like they got a new domain
whosbacon 13y ago
Glad to see the browser extensions released. Thanks for this awesome project!
rossjudson 13y ago
One straightforward fix: A law that says an "I Agree" button only binds the user to the text that's actually visible on the screen. More text? More buttons! That will drastically cut down on the boilerplate. Want to straitjacket your users with 60 pages of user agreement? No problem! You're only 60 button clicks away from complete lack of liability.
- thaumasiotes 13y ago
  Some people have taller monitors than others. Some browse in different font sizes. There is no way, even in theory, of determining what was visible on screen. edit: really, this is the exact same problem as "some people have taller screens than others", but some people have taller browser windows than others too. If I want to get some text off screen before clicking "I agree", it's fully within my power to do so.
  - rossjudson 13y ago
    I have been too successful muting my sarcasm. You are correct! My impractical idea is, indeed, impractical. The point is that when we allow arbitrarily complex language to be buried under a single agreement action, a user has no idea what they are actually agreeing to. And everybody knows it. So we should just make such agreements null and void until the technology community (us) and the lawyers can come up with a way of breaking these user agreements down into digestible, understandable units.
    - knome 13y ago
      Null and void seems extreme to me. These sorts of agreements do serve a perfectly good purpose. While I would not agree that users should be held liable by terms as either criminal or civil infractions of any sort, they certainly work well to advise the user of what services they will be provided, under what circumstances the provider will be justified in removing service, whether or not the customer will be refunded in those situations, etc. As a declaration of intent of service, potentially usable defensively by the company should a user take umbrage against the service, they are excellent. As anything else, they're pretty worthless.
vysakh0 13y ago
This is one of the best needed extension. Also this gets user some idea on how each site treats users.
weisser 13y ago
This is a fantastic idea. Of course, you need to be able to trust that the summaries cover the most important aspects but this seems like a good team to deliver.
- deepdog 13y ago
  What would be nice is if they included the summarized legal text under More Details. So I could click more details and actually see what the ToS says for that particular summary.
- jancborchardt 13y ago
  Thank you! And yes, while some of us are lawyers of course the page can not be considered legal advice.
johnnygoods 13y ago
Be wary of installing this extension, and this is why: It's not lost on the legal world that no one reads Terms of Service. As a result, TOS are rarely enforceable in court, except inasmuch as they comply with broad industry standards. However, compliance requirements are much MORE strict for parties who demonstrably should be aware of their legal obligations. Lawyers, for example, can't really argue that they didn't read a legal document they executed because of the manner in which it was delivered (in an inscrutable TOS doc, at the entrance to an amusement park, etc). If you install this extension, you might actually be making yourself MORE bound to crappy terms of service, since you will not be able to make the case that obviously you didn't read them terms and therefore should not be held to some non-standard provision. The reviews/ratings provided by tosdr.org are awesome, and I hope you guys continue this project, but I, for one, will be covering my ass and not installing this extension.
- lettergram 13y ago
  Even by stating that you wont be installing the extension to cover your ass, you clearly know you should be reading the terms of service...
  - pyre 13y ago
    That's assuming that this post is linked to him/her and comes back to haunt later.
- mokash 13y ago
  Catch-22.
- jancborchardt 13y ago
  Jan from ToS;DR here: Rating the websites and making these ratings easily available is only the first step. Raising people’s awareness of bad terms and then getting services to actually use proper terms is the actual goal.
- mikegagnon 13y ago
  > If you install this extension, you might actually be making yourself MORE bound to crappy terms of service, since you will not be able to make the case that obviously you didn't read them terms and therefore should not be held to some non-standard provision. I estimate the likelihood of me ending up in court over a TOS violation extremely low. In the history of the Web, how many times has a consumer been the recipient of a lawsuit over a TOS violation? However, the likelihood is very high that I will encounter TOS provisions on the Web that are objectionable to me. I would like to know what these provisions are, even if I am forced to click accept because I want to use the service anyway. I am not a fan of maintaining ignorance for the sake of plausible deniability.
cybernoodles 13y ago
Of all sites, no ToS on Facebook available?
- i_cannot_hack 13y ago
  http://tosdr.org/#facebook http://tosdr.org/#facebook
  - jancborchardt 13y ago
    And the rating is nearly done, the class should be up in a few days.
ef4 13y ago
This is a nice idea. I would love to see these kind of agreements get commoditized and standardized, so that a new service can just check a bunch of boxes to generate their terms, and we can even represent the agreement in a machine readable standard way.
- jancborchardt 13y ago
  Yes, we had some people ask us about that. It’s not really our core focus so we will probably not do it, but if anyone wants to build it our data is all open source and freely licensed: http://github.com/tosdr http://github.com/tosdr
deleted 13y ago
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- jancborchardt 13y ago
  Ah, interesting to know the reason for the CAPITAL LETTERS, thank you! In perceptual psychology the problem that they are ignored is also known as »Banner Blindness«: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banner_blindness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banner_blindness – »a phenomenon in web usability where visitors to a website consciously or subconsciously ignore banner-like information«.
- hugoroy 13y ago
  There are other solutions to fix this, http://tieguy.org/blog/2012/08/19/a-quick-note-on-conspicuous-text-also-known-as-all-caps/ http://tieguy.org/blog/2012/08/19/a-quick-note-on-conspicuou... However, if you think this is really the problem about ToS, I think you're missing the bigger picture: http://tosdr.org/blog/tosdr-in-action-i-have-read-and-agree.html http://tosdr.org/blog/tosdr-in-action-i-have-read-and-agree....
thom 13y ago
As I understand it, some of the thinking in the Vendor Relationship Management space [1] flips the 'informed consent' equation on its head - you as an individual specify what standards a vendor has to sign up to when dealing with your data, and _they_ are the ones agreeing. I don't know the degree to which this really fixes the CLICK ON ANY BUTTON IT TAKES TO GET ME INTO FACEBOOK approach of most users, but it's an interesting thought experiment at least. [1] http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/projectvrm/Main_Page http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/projectvrm/Main_Page
graylights 13y ago
I like it. I'm more interested in the site then the extension though. Things I'd like to see: 1. Highlight sites that have changed terms recently. 2. The discussion links should show how active the discussion pages are
- jancborchardt 13y ago
  Thank you for the suggestions! We already consider point 1 because we took over TOSback, a project started by EFF to track changes in ToS. As for point 2: We always welcome contributors! Either submit a feature in the tracker or dig into the code yourself: http://github.com/tosdr http://github.com/tosdr
Tangaroa 13y ago
What we need is a court ruling that people who click through these things have no intention to be bound by the contract, and therefore aren't.
- icebraining 13y ago
  Then why couldn't that be applied to other contracts, particularly services? "I signed it, but I had no intention of being bound by it".
  - GeneralMayhem 13y ago
    Maybe it should be. Contract law was written/established to govern negotiated agreements between comparably well-informed parties, not untold pages of labyrinthine jargon attached to every transaction that the consumer won't understand and doesn't have a chance to argue except by refusing to use the service. If you as a business (who has significantly greater resources and expertise, and therefore greater responsibility, than the customer) want a random person to sign a legal document with you, you should have to go to some reasonable effort to make sure they understand what they're signing, not just shove it at them and say "sign on the dotted line."
    - dinkumthinkum 13y ago
      How would your proposed system work in the real world? In the civilized world, we expect people to handle grievances in a court of law and not just club each other when we are not happy, so how could your proposed system ever be workable in any real sense? Just asking.
    - DannyBee 13y ago
      I can't wait to wait in line at home depot while the sales register person explains in detail their various return policies, possible limits on liability due to you being an idiot with a snowblower, etc.
Pherdnut 13y ago
This is brilliant.
belorn 13y ago
While I applaud the effort, in the end, it is mostly just a game played by lawyers who write ToS. Terms of Service tries to be legally document, enforceable across borders. Its not related to copyright, so there aren't any treaties to unify each countries laws. Also, because it is not copyright, ToS get put into the all covering service/contract law. Where I live, Sweden, those laws was written in 1900, and is in my view 100% incompatible with ToS or EULA's. To take one example, they require that the person providing a contract makes sure that the other party is fully informed of the contract, and that the other party is benefited from signing the contract in relation to the terms. Reading the history around it, they basically makes in unlawful to knowingly "trick" people to sign contracts that are one-sided.[1] On the "trick people to sign" part, I am also slightly considering the fact that companies often know how long time someone spends reading an ToS/EULA. They know when, and how many people can't have human possible read the agreement before pressing OK. When MMORPG clients update a new agreement, people are logging in seconds after its possible. If you knowingly are going into a contract with someone who hasn't read and understood the terms, its hard to claim that the contract was made in good-faith (jfr BrB 9 kap 1 §). All in all, ToS and EULA's just seems to me as an broken concept. https://lagen.nu/1915:218 https://lagen.nu/1915:218 30§ and 36§
- jancborchardt 13y ago
  We pretty much agree that it’s a broken concept. But that doesn’t keep companies from data retention, or using your content with their copyright, or or or …
- seferphier 13y ago
  I believe the purpose of service is to raise awareness of your legal rights and what rights you sacrifice when using the service. In Common Law jurisdictions, "I read and agree with ToS" is prima facie (on its surface) binding on the user. You cannot get away from a contract by simply not reading it - many people would repudiate their contracts if this was the case. I do not believe there is such a law in Common Law about "tricking people" to sign contracts. Whether a term is lawful depends on the circumstances of the case - this is why law is complex and must be cases must be litigated in order to determine lawfulness. Many contracts we sign are one-sided. This is due to the respected bargaining power of the parties. The courts and the legislature have to balance between interfering with the freedom of contract and the notion of fairness. Some terms must be one-sided by nature- eg: banks can unilaterally change the interest rate on your property.
jchung 13y ago
Ironically, they didn't seem to take the time to summarize the terms of service for their own service. In fact, I can't figure out what the terms are for tosdr.org at all.
- hugoroy 13y ago
  http://tosdr.org/legal.html http://tosdr.org/legal.html (linked from the bottom) But there are no specific terms around the service we provide to you. The only thing is a disclaimer: "this is not legal advice" this is just our opinions. It's like reading an article or a book. You don't need to accept ToS to do that ;-) One other example would be to use Free Software. If you download and use, e.g. GNU/Linux, you are not accepting any ToS. (For instance, only modification and distribution of copies is regulated by the GNU GPL. Merely using the program is not).
  - mikegagnon 13y ago
    I think you should assess and rate your own legal page using the same standards you apply everywhere else. If there is no ToS (as you point out here), you should say that. If nothing else, it's a usability issue. I assume that tosdr.org has a good ToS, so if I want to see what an A-rated ToS looks like (according to your ratings) I should navigate to your page and your browser extension should tell me.
natch 13y ago
So what is it? The "About" button just says it's a project intended to fix something. It gives some WHO and WHEN info, but it doesn't say HOW it will fix it or WHAT it does. Instead it asks me to take a large step of trust by installing executable code into my browser.
- jancborchardt 13y ago
  Sorry, the short »About« is a bit lower down on the page, before the ratings: »We are a user rights initiative to rate and label website terms & privacy policies, from very good Class A to very bad Class E. Terms of service are often too long to read, but it's important to understand what's in them. Your rights online depend on them. We hope that the ratings below can help you with that.«
- hugoroy 13y ago
  "a large step of trust by installing executable code into my browser." Have you read the page where you get the extension? http://tosdr.org/downloads.html http://tosdr.org/downloads.html : you can get the source code on http://github.com/tosdr http://github.com/tosdr
jancborchardt 13y ago
Jan from ToS;DR here. Please ask if you have any questions! And if you want to contribute, come join us! http://tosdr.org/contribute.html http://tosdr.org/contribute.html We are a completely non-profit and open-source project. Source at http://github.com/tosdr http://github.com/tosdr and API at http://tosdr.org/api.html http://tosdr.org/api.html Please note though that nothing in the page is legal advice. We just want to help people know a bit better what Terms of Service say.
- seferphier 13y ago
  Great service. You need to put in the version / date of these ToS, otherwise it would be hard to update. I would also keep an archive of all the ToS on your servers since volunteers would like to use track changes as a new version is published rather than re-reading the ToS. It would be also interesting to see how the terms have changed through the years. A great feature would be to categorize these services by category. Eg: for search engine: Bing, Google, DuckDuckGo. You could add a more comprehensive chart on the terms and how it compares across these services. Eg: Tracking: Google keeps ur data. DuckDuckGo does not track user data.
  - hugoroy 13y ago
    Hi. Exactly, we're trying to fix this with http://github.com/tosdr/ToSBack3 http://github.com/tosdr/ToSBack3 but this is not ready unfortunately :-(
    - seferphier 13y ago
      very cool. thank you for all your work. I also suggest that I can click into the brief description which will bring us to the exact term in question and highlight any other relevant terms. This may increase the chances of people reading the ToS and also increase participation. If I was reading a term on your site and I was referred to the actual term and realized that ToS;DR is incorrect, i would likely to correct it.
- mikegagnon 13y ago
  Awesome idea. This is the first Chrome extension I have ever found worth installing. Thanks! I think one issue with a service like this, is that your rating of TOS provisions might not match with my own. Which is why it's great that you link your rankings to discussions of provisions and their rating.
chacham15 13y ago
My question is whether people will choose to not use a service because of its terms. I think that much like Andriod/iPhone app permissions, it doesnt matter much.
- jancborchardt 13y ago
  As I said in another comment: » Rating the websites and making these ratings easily available is only the first step. Raising people’s awareness of bad terms and then getting services to actually use proper terms is the actual goal.« (Original comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5889189 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5889189 )
Sami_Lehtinen 13y ago
Old solution is to drop three words in the document pizza which are clearly out of context. When customer says he has read the tos, great, let's give him 60 seconds to tell which words didn't belong to the banana document. It's easy to give those word if you did read it, if you didn't then you're not clearly smart enough to use our service and your monkey account application has been refused. Thank you. Btw. IBM cloud computing agreement was so ridiculously long, that I can signup and setup everything up and running with Linode or UpCloud before I have even finished reading their agreement.
gesman 13y ago
TOS is like last peace of underwear in between you and girl's body. No matter how it looks like you want to get rid of it with one click to reach for the juicy part.
- jancborchardt 13y ago
  This comparison is uncalled for and demeaning. Please refrain from posting sexist jokes which add nothing to the discussion.
  - gesman 13y ago
    It's not a joke. It's life. Get on it.
    - jancborchardt 13y ago
      No, I will not get on it. Comments like yours above are a big reason why women feel uncomfortable in our community. Hacker News is not a platform for perpetuating the ancient and ostracizing concept that hackers are a bunch of guys.
    - hugoroy 13y ago
      Funny. You should have read the Y Combinator Hacker News Guidelines: "Be civil." http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
simonbrown 13y ago
For the Chrome extension, you probably don't need to request permissions on tosdr.org. If you send CORS headers from that site, you will be able to make requests to it without the permissions.
- jancborchardt 13y ago
  Thanks! Opened an issue on our tracker, chime in if you like: https://github.com/tosdr/tosdr-chrome/issues/5 https://github.com/tosdr/tosdr-chrome/issues/5
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
- jancborchardt 13y ago
  And it’s fixed for the Chrome extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/terms-of-service-didn%E2%80%99t-r/hjdoplcnndgiblooccencgcggcoihigg https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/terms-of-service-d... Thank you again for the pointer. :)
tonydiv 13y ago
I have seen this site a few times, but they don't have rankings for some of the most popular services/sites such as Google, Facebook, etc. If this is supposed to be helpful, is there a reason why they still don't have classes for popular services yet?
- jancborchardt 13y ago
  Please check the page again, we have the rating for Google since a few weeks.Facebook will follow very soon. Also we reorganized the sorting on the frontpage so rated services come first.
mcovey 13y ago
I've been checking out the TOS a lot more often lately, be it before or after signing up. A surprising number of sites have converted to readable bulleted lists in a language mostly resembling English. Unfortunately, it's mostly smaller sites and services whose terms will likely never matter to the average user. For the bigger sites that want your important data, you still need a legal dictionary, a pen and paper, and a glass of wine to get through.
- jancborchardt 13y ago
  And in some cases of bigger sites summarizing their terms, it's straightforward incorrect, 500px for example: http://tosdr.org/#500px http://tosdr.org/#500px That's why we think it's important for an independent non-profit to review all these services. And that's also why we chose the simple green-red main scale with a bulleted list, including details on how we arrived at that rating.
davidjohnstone 13y ago
> “I have read and agree to the Terms” is the biggest lie on the web. We aim to fix that. I deliberately worded it on my website as "By clicking the register button you are accepting the terms of service", under the assumption that the vast majority of people would assume it's normal and sane (whatever that means) and not read it, and therefore create an account honestly.
olegp 13y ago
We tried integrating with TOSDR and similar services via their APIs at https://starthq.com https://starthq.com, but it quickly became clear that the number of services they cover is too low for it to be useful. I do appreciate the effort though!
- hugoroy 13y ago
  You're using our API? Please get in touch with us. We're a very small team and the project is very young. You can't really expect to use it like that without telling us and expect it to work well! (It's open data and free software, you don't legally have to tell us, but please do so). http://tosdr.org/about.html#contact http://tosdr.org/about.html#contact
  - olegp 13y ago
    OK, will be in touch.
pikewood 13y ago
My friend and I created http://www.eulascan.com/ http://www.eulascan.com/ back in 2005 with this same concept in mind. We got some nice writeups, but it never really gained traction and we didn't have the time to upkeep the site; spam weeds have overgrown it at this point. My thought was that people still didn't care enough about EULAs to bother using it or reviewing it. Generally, we got the most comments on companies that were unliked (Apple, Microsoft), and the reviews became another way to express disgust at a company. Another thing to consider is the ever-changing terms in an EULA. Your site does not have a version concept, meaning you could be reading reviews on wording that does not exist in the existing EULA.

440 points by rfreytag 13y ago

Any chance to find out, what this is doing, without having to install an extension?

yareally 13y ago
Click "ratings" at the top of the page.
Skalman 13y ago
Scroll down to see the ratings of some popular sites' ToS. The extension shows you that same rating when visiting a website.
hobs 13y ago
I had the same thought, it took me a good twenty seconds of clicking around to figure out "What the hell does it do?"
jancborchardt 13y ago
Sorry for the confusion, we’re moving the short description a bit up and in general make it more clear what we do: Rate terms of service of websites. :)

I was using it until it required additional rights for some reason. Then I suspected it to be making an online profile and selling it, so I uninstalled it.

jancborchardt 13y ago
Jan from ToS;DR here: I’m not sure why it required additional rights, but I can assure you that we’re not selling anything. We are a fully non-profit and open project, if you still have doubts you can read the code to the extensions and install them manually via https://github.com/tosdr/tosdr-firefox https://github.com/tosdr/tosdr-firefox (for Firefox) or https://github.com/tosdr/tosdr-chrome https://github.com/tosdr/tosdr-chrome (for Chrome), and the other browser extensions are also there on Github.
jancborchardt 13y ago
FIXED: The additional rights are no longer needed for the Chrome extension, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5890055 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5890055

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

seferphier 13y ago

This is something we really need as consumers. A short summary of essential terms for us to know about. Would be interested in Mobile apps like: Instagram, Vine and Path.

jancborchardt 13y ago
We started on Instagram already: http://tosdr.org/#instagram http://tosdr.org/#instagram and will hopefully review it more and give it a class soon. :)

makepanic 13y ago

previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4350907 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4350907 looks like they got a new domain

whosbacon 13y ago

Glad to see the browser extensions released. Thanks for this awesome project!

rossjudson 13y ago

One straightforward fix: A law that says an "I Agree" button only binds the user to the text that's actually visible on the screen. More text? More buttons! That will drastically cut down on the boilerplate. Want to straitjacket your users with 60 pages of user agreement? No problem! You're only 60 button clicks away from complete lack of liability.

thaumasiotes 13y ago
Some people have taller monitors than others. Some browse in different font sizes. There is no way, even in theory, of determining what was visible on screen. edit: really, this is the exact same problem as "some people have taller screens than others", but some people have taller browser windows than others too. If I want to get some text off screen before clicking "I agree", it's fully within my power to do so.
- rossjudson 13y ago
  I have been too successful muting my sarcasm. You are correct! My impractical idea is, indeed, impractical. The point is that when we allow arbitrarily complex language to be buried under a single agreement action, a user has no idea what they are actually agreeing to. And everybody knows it. So we should just make such agreements null and void until the technology community (us) and the lawyers can come up with a way of breaking these user agreements down into digestible, understandable units.
  - knome 13y ago
    Null and void seems extreme to me. These sorts of agreements do serve a perfectly good purpose. While I would not agree that users should be held liable by terms as either criminal or civil infractions of any sort, they certainly work well to advise the user of what services they will be provided, under what circumstances the provider will be justified in removing service, whether or not the customer will be refunded in those situations, etc. As a declaration of intent of service, potentially usable defensively by the company should a user take umbrage against the service, they are excellent. As anything else, they're pretty worthless.

vysakh0 13y ago

This is one of the best needed extension. Also this gets user some idea on how each site treats users.

weisser 13y ago

This is a fantastic idea. Of course, you need to be able to trust that the summaries cover the most important aspects but this seems like a good team to deliver.

deepdog 13y ago
What would be nice is if they included the summarized legal text under More Details. So I could click more details and actually see what the ToS says for that particular summary.
jancborchardt 13y ago
Thank you! And yes, while some of us are lawyers of course the page can not be considered legal advice.

johnnygoods 13y ago

Be wary of installing this extension, and this is why: It's not lost on the legal world that no one reads Terms of Service. As a result, TOS are rarely enforceable in court, except inasmuch as they comply with broad industry standards. However, compliance requirements are much MORE strict for parties who demonstrably should be aware of their legal obligations. Lawyers, for example, can't really argue that they didn't read a legal document they executed because of the manner in which it was delivered (in an inscrutable TOS doc, at the entrance to an amusement park, etc). If you install this extension, you might actually be making yourself MORE bound to crappy terms of service, since you will not be able to make the case that obviously you didn't read them terms and therefore should not be held to some non-standard provision. The reviews/ratings provided by tosdr.org are awesome, and I hope you guys continue this project, but I, for one, will be covering my ass and not installing this extension.

lettergram 13y ago
Even by stating that you wont be installing the extension to cover your ass, you clearly know you should be reading the terms of service...
- pyre 13y ago
  That's assuming that this post is linked to him/her and comes back to haunt later.
mokash 13y ago
Catch-22.
jancborchardt 13y ago
Jan from ToS;DR here: Rating the websites and making these ratings easily available is only the first step. Raising people’s awareness of bad terms and then getting services to actually use proper terms is the actual goal.
mikegagnon 13y ago
> If you install this extension, you might actually be making yourself MORE bound to crappy terms of service, since you will not be able to make the case that obviously you didn't read them terms and therefore should not be held to some non-standard provision. I estimate the likelihood of me ending up in court over a TOS violation extremely low. In the history of the Web, how many times has a consumer been the recipient of a lawsuit over a TOS violation? However, the likelihood is very high that I will encounter TOS provisions on the Web that are objectionable to me. I would like to know what these provisions are, even if I am forced to click accept because I want to use the service anyway. I am not a fan of maintaining ignorance for the sake of plausible deniability.

cybernoodles 13y ago

Of all sites, no ToS on Facebook available?

i_cannot_hack 13y ago
http://tosdr.org/#facebook http://tosdr.org/#facebook
- jancborchardt 13y ago
  And the rating is nearly done, the class should be up in a few days.

ef4 13y ago

This is a nice idea. I would love to see these kind of agreements get commoditized and standardized, so that a new service can just check a bunch of boxes to generate their terms, and we can even represent the agreement in a machine readable standard way.

jancborchardt 13y ago
Yes, we had some people ask us about that. It’s not really our core focus so we will probably not do it, but if anyone wants to build it our data is all open source and freely licensed: http://github.com/tosdr http://github.com/tosdr

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

jancborchardt 13y ago
Ah, interesting to know the reason for the CAPITAL LETTERS, thank you! In perceptual psychology the problem that they are ignored is also known as »Banner Blindness«: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banner_blindness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banner_blindness – »a phenomenon in web usability where visitors to a website consciously or subconsciously ignore banner-like information«.
hugoroy 13y ago
There are other solutions to fix this, http://tieguy.org/blog/2012/08/19/a-quick-note-on-conspicuous-text-also-known-as-all-caps/ http://tieguy.org/blog/2012/08/19/a-quick-note-on-conspicuou... However, if you think this is really the problem about ToS, I think you're missing the bigger picture: http://tosdr.org/blog/tosdr-in-action-i-have-read-and-agree.html http://tosdr.org/blog/tosdr-in-action-i-have-read-and-agree....

thom 13y ago

As I understand it, some of the thinking in the Vendor Relationship Management space [1] flips the 'informed consent' equation on its head - you as an individual specify what standards a vendor has to sign up to when dealing with your data, and _they_ are the ones agreeing. I don't know the degree to which this really fixes the CLICK ON ANY BUTTON IT TAKES TO GET ME INTO FACEBOOK approach of most users, but it's an interesting thought experiment at least. [1] http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/projectvrm/Main_Page http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/projectvrm/Main_Page

graylights 13y ago

I like it. I'm more interested in the site then the extension though. Things I'd like to see: 1. Highlight sites that have changed terms recently. 2. The discussion links should show how active the discussion pages are

jancborchardt 13y ago
Thank you for the suggestions! We already consider point 1 because we took over TOSback, a project started by EFF to track changes in ToS. As for point 2: We always welcome contributors! Either submit a feature in the tracker or dig into the code yourself: http://github.com/tosdr http://github.com/tosdr

Tangaroa 13y ago

What we need is a court ruling that people who click through these things have no intention to be bound by the contract, and therefore aren't.

icebraining 13y ago
Then why couldn't that be applied to other contracts, particularly services? "I signed it, but I had no intention of being bound by it".
- GeneralMayhem 13y ago
  Maybe it should be. Contract law was written/established to govern negotiated agreements between comparably well-informed parties, not untold pages of labyrinthine jargon attached to every transaction that the consumer won't understand and doesn't have a chance to argue except by refusing to use the service. If you as a business (who has significantly greater resources and expertise, and therefore greater responsibility, than the customer) want a random person to sign a legal document with you, you should have to go to some reasonable effort to make sure they understand what they're signing, not just shove it at them and say "sign on the dotted line."
  - dinkumthinkum 13y ago
    How would your proposed system work in the real world? In the civilized world, we expect people to handle grievances in a court of law and not just club each other when we are not happy, so how could your proposed system ever be workable in any real sense? Just asking.
  - DannyBee 13y ago
    I can't wait to wait in line at home depot while the sales register person explains in detail their various return policies, possible limits on liability due to you being an idiot with a snowblower, etc.

Pherdnut 13y ago

This is brilliant.

belorn 13y ago

While I applaud the effort, in the end, it is mostly just a game played by lawyers who write ToS. Terms of Service tries to be legally document, enforceable across borders. Its not related to copyright, so there aren't any treaties to unify each countries laws. Also, because it is not copyright, ToS get put into the all covering service/contract law. Where I live, Sweden, those laws was written in 1900, and is in my view 100% incompatible with ToS or EULA's. To take one example, they require that the person providing a contract makes sure that the other party is fully informed of the contract, and that the other party is benefited from signing the contract in relation to the terms. Reading the history around it, they basically makes in unlawful to knowingly "trick" people to sign contracts that are one-sided.[1] On the "trick people to sign" part, I am also slightly considering the fact that companies often know how long time someone spends reading an ToS/EULA. They know when, and how many people can't have human possible read the agreement before pressing OK. When MMORPG clients update a new agreement, people are logging in seconds after its possible. If you knowingly are going into a contract with someone who hasn't read and understood the terms, its hard to claim that the contract was made in good-faith (jfr BrB 9 kap 1 §). All in all, ToS and EULA's just seems to me as an broken concept. https://lagen.nu/1915:218 https://lagen.nu/1915:218 30§ and 36§

jancborchardt 13y ago
We pretty much agree that it’s a broken concept. But that doesn’t keep companies from data retention, or using your content with their copyright, or or or …
seferphier 13y ago
I believe the purpose of service is to raise awareness of your legal rights and what rights you sacrifice when using the service. In Common Law jurisdictions, "I read and agree with ToS" is prima facie (on its surface) binding on the user. You cannot get away from a contract by simply not reading it - many people would repudiate their contracts if this was the case. I do not believe there is such a law in Common Law about "tricking people" to sign contracts. Whether a term is lawful depends on the circumstances of the case - this is why law is complex and must be cases must be litigated in order to determine lawfulness. Many contracts we sign are one-sided. This is due to the respected bargaining power of the parties. The courts and the legislature have to balance between interfering with the freedom of contract and the notion of fairness. Some terms must be one-sided by nature- eg: banks can unilaterally change the interest rate on your property.

jchung 13y ago

Ironically, they didn't seem to take the time to summarize the terms of service for their own service. In fact, I can't figure out what the terms are for tosdr.org at all.

hugoroy 13y ago
http://tosdr.org/legal.html http://tosdr.org/legal.html (linked from the bottom) But there are no specific terms around the service we provide to you. The only thing is a disclaimer: "this is not legal advice" this is just our opinions. It's like reading an article or a book. You don't need to accept ToS to do that ;-) One other example would be to use Free Software. If you download and use, e.g. GNU/Linux, you are not accepting any ToS. (For instance, only modification and distribution of copies is regulated by the GNU GPL. Merely using the program is not).
- mikegagnon 13y ago
  I think you should assess and rate your own legal page using the same standards you apply everywhere else. If there is no ToS (as you point out here), you should say that. If nothing else, it's a usability issue. I assume that tosdr.org has a good ToS, so if I want to see what an A-rated ToS looks like (according to your ratings) I should navigate to your page and your browser extension should tell me.

natch 13y ago

So what is it? The "About" button just says it's a project intended to fix something. It gives some WHO and WHEN info, but it doesn't say HOW it will fix it or WHAT it does. Instead it asks me to take a large step of trust by installing executable code into my browser.

jancborchardt 13y ago
Sorry, the short »About« is a bit lower down on the page, before the ratings: »We are a user rights initiative to rate and label website terms & privacy policies, from very good Class A to very bad Class E. Terms of service are often too long to read, but it's important to understand what's in them. Your rights online depend on them. We hope that the ratings below can help you with that.«
hugoroy 13y ago
"a large step of trust by installing executable code into my browser." Have you read the page where you get the extension? http://tosdr.org/downloads.html http://tosdr.org/downloads.html : you can get the source code on http://github.com/tosdr http://github.com/tosdr

jancborchardt 13y ago

Jan from ToS;DR here. Please ask if you have any questions! And if you want to contribute, come join us! http://tosdr.org/contribute.html http://tosdr.org/contribute.html We are a completely non-profit and open-source project. Source at http://github.com/tosdr http://github.com/tosdr and API at http://tosdr.org/api.html http://tosdr.org/api.html Please note though that nothing in the page is legal advice. We just want to help people know a bit better what Terms of Service say.

seferphier 13y ago
Great service. You need to put in the version / date of these ToS, otherwise it would be hard to update. I would also keep an archive of all the ToS on your servers since volunteers would like to use track changes as a new version is published rather than re-reading the ToS. It would be also interesting to see how the terms have changed through the years. A great feature would be to categorize these services by category. Eg: for search engine: Bing, Google, DuckDuckGo. You could add a more comprehensive chart on the terms and how it compares across these services. Eg: Tracking: Google keeps ur data. DuckDuckGo does not track user data.
- hugoroy 13y ago
  Hi. Exactly, we're trying to fix this with http://github.com/tosdr/ToSBack3 http://github.com/tosdr/ToSBack3 but this is not ready unfortunately :-(
  - seferphier 13y ago
    very cool. thank you for all your work. I also suggest that I can click into the brief description which will bring us to the exact term in question and highlight any other relevant terms. This may increase the chances of people reading the ToS and also increase participation. If I was reading a term on your site and I was referred to the actual term and realized that ToS;DR is incorrect, i would likely to correct it.
mikegagnon 13y ago
Awesome idea. This is the first Chrome extension I have ever found worth installing. Thanks! I think one issue with a service like this, is that your rating of TOS provisions might not match with my own. Which is why it's great that you link your rankings to discussions of provisions and their rating.

chacham15 13y ago

My question is whether people will choose to not use a service because of its terms. I think that much like Andriod/iPhone app permissions, it doesnt matter much.

jancborchardt 13y ago
As I said in another comment: » Rating the websites and making these ratings easily available is only the first step. Raising people’s awareness of bad terms and then getting services to actually use proper terms is the actual goal.« (Original comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5889189 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5889189 )

Sami_Lehtinen 13y ago

Old solution is to drop three words in the document pizza which are clearly out of context. When customer says he has read the tos, great, let's give him 60 seconds to tell which words didn't belong to the banana document. It's easy to give those word if you did read it, if you didn't then you're not clearly smart enough to use our service and your monkey account application has been refused. Thank you. Btw. IBM cloud computing agreement was so ridiculously long, that I can signup and setup everything up and running with Linode or UpCloud before I have even finished reading their agreement.

gesman 13y ago

TOS is like last peace of underwear in between you and girl's body. No matter how it looks like you want to get rid of it with one click to reach for the juicy part.

jancborchardt 13y ago
This comparison is uncalled for and demeaning. Please refrain from posting sexist jokes which add nothing to the discussion.
- gesman 13y ago
  It's not a joke. It's life. Get on it.
  - jancborchardt 13y ago
    No, I will not get on it. Comments like yours above are a big reason why women feel uncomfortable in our community. Hacker News is not a platform for perpetuating the ancient and ostracizing concept that hackers are a bunch of guys.
  - hugoroy 13y ago
    Funny. You should have read the Y Combinator Hacker News Guidelines: "Be civil." http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

simonbrown 13y ago

For the Chrome extension, you probably don't need to request permissions on tosdr.org. If you send CORS headers from that site, you will be able to make requests to it without the permissions.

jancborchardt 13y ago
Thanks! Opened an issue on our tracker, chime in if you like: https://github.com/tosdr/tosdr-chrome/issues/5 https://github.com/tosdr/tosdr-chrome/issues/5
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
jancborchardt 13y ago
And it’s fixed for the Chrome extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/terms-of-service-didn%E2%80%99t-r/hjdoplcnndgiblooccencgcggcoihigg https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/terms-of-service-d... Thank you again for the pointer. :)

tonydiv 13y ago

I have seen this site a few times, but they don't have rankings for some of the most popular services/sites such as Google, Facebook, etc. If this is supposed to be helpful, is there a reason why they still don't have classes for popular services yet?

jancborchardt 13y ago
Please check the page again, we have the rating for Google since a few weeks.Facebook will follow very soon. Also we reorganized the sorting on the frontpage so rated services come first.

mcovey 13y ago

I've been checking out the TOS a lot more often lately, be it before or after signing up. A surprising number of sites have converted to readable bulleted lists in a language mostly resembling English. Unfortunately, it's mostly smaller sites and services whose terms will likely never matter to the average user. For the bigger sites that want your important data, you still need a legal dictionary, a pen and paper, and a glass of wine to get through.

jancborchardt 13y ago
And in some cases of bigger sites summarizing their terms, it's straightforward incorrect, 500px for example: http://tosdr.org/#500px http://tosdr.org/#500px That's why we think it's important for an independent non-profit to review all these services. And that's also why we chose the simple green-red main scale with a bulleted list, including details on how we arrived at that rating.

davidjohnstone 13y ago

> “I have read and agree to the Terms” is the biggest lie on the web. We aim to fix that. I deliberately worded it on my website as "By clicking the register button you are accepting the terms of service", under the assumption that the vast majority of people would assume it's normal and sane (whatever that means) and not read it, and therefore create an account honestly.

olegp 13y ago

We tried integrating with TOSDR and similar services via their APIs at https://starthq.com https://starthq.com, but it quickly became clear that the number of services they cover is too low for it to be useful. I do appreciate the effort though!

hugoroy 13y ago
You're using our API? Please get in touch with us. We're a very small team and the project is very young. You can't really expect to use it like that without telling us and expect it to work well! (It's open data and free software, you don't legally have to tell us, but please do so). http://tosdr.org/about.html#contact http://tosdr.org/about.html#contact
- olegp 13y ago
  OK, will be in touch.

pikewood 13y ago

My friend and I created http://www.eulascan.com/ http://www.eulascan.com/ back in 2005 with this same concept in mind. We got some nice writeups, but it never really gained traction and we didn't have the time to upkeep the site; spam weeds have overgrown it at this point. My thought was that people still didn't care enough about EULAs to bother using it or reviewing it. Generally, we got the most comments on companies that were unliked (Apple, Microsoft), and the reviews became another way to express disgust at a company. Another thing to consider is the ever-changing terms in an EULA. Your site does not have a version concept, meaning you could be reading reviews on wording that does not exist in the existing EULA.