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Terms of Service, Didn't Read
- MrBoomixer 11y agoThis has been around for a long while. It's in need of much love from online communities.
- eterm 11y agoReaching the frontpage of /r/all yesterday should help that part.
- jancborchardt 11y agoYes please – for info on how to get involved please check https://tosdr.org/contribute.html https://tosdr.org/contribute.html – thanks!
- empyrical 11y agoThere's also this similar website which seems to be mainly used for software licenses https://tldrlegal.com https://tldrlegal.com
- kefka 11y agoWhen you pirate the software to begin with, license agreements are kind of moot. Well, that and using open source software. Most of those dictates decide what to do if you want to use their code.
- coldpie 11y agoAs an open source user, I'm always baffled when I run a proprietary application and I start to read this big box of confusing, useless text before realizing it's a EULA.
- reagency 11y agoAre you baffled when you run an open source application and the GPL pops up?
- vezzy-fnord 11y agoProbably means I accidentally typed "warranty" somewhere to find I have no warranty.
- coldpie 11y agoI don't think I've ever seen this happen. It's not something end users need to agree to, so why would an application show it to end users?
- kefka 11y agoI've seen it on MS platforms when someone packs a GPL program using Windows installers. It's assumed that if you develop for Windows, it's going to be proprietary and a restrictive license. So the packagers have a click-continue EULA boilerplate. And then the open source packager copy-pastes the GPL in the EULA screen. It's annoying, but I have seen it rarely. Thank goodness that Apt doesnt do this.
- kefka 11y agoThat's where I sit most of the time. I prefer using Linux as my desktop, as well as my server OS. I'm looking into combining my machines under Mesos, but that'll take some figuring out (as opposed to Kubernetes and friends). My degree calls for, unfortunately, very vertical programs that I cannot afford (3d design - Autodesk Inventor, Cateia, Solidworks). So I resort to piracy for my learning. I still feel wrong to make profit on pirated works. However, I'm also learning FreeCAD as well how they develop it. This is what I use when I make money on 3d designs. I'd much rather it win out than things like Inventor anyday.
- Bjartr 11y agoI know at least Autodesk lets you download their entire suite (inventor included) if you can provide them a .edu email address, for the purpose of learning, your exact use case. I can't speak for the others.
- lucaspottersky 11y agosurprisingly Stackoverflow isn't listed there yet... :P
- belorn 11y agoEven those that are rated best, I doubt anyone can really explain the scope of the contract or each party's responsibilities without going into further details of my country's contract law, EU contract law, consumer protection laws, precedence and a few years of legal studies. For example, when kolab says they should be, "To the extent permitted by the law", be excluded from any liability and be completely indemnify from all and everything, what does that actually mean? What does that mean for fit-for-purpose, or quality assurance, or to use a Swedish contract law: fairness in the contractual terms? Here we got a Class A contract which I have no clue what, if anything, each party has agreed on. The only part I could reasonable figure as a contracted responsibility is that they will provide 30 days for customers to agree to the new terms if they decide to change prices. Also, customers are required by the contract to make private backups, which is quite an odd contractual responsibility to demand from customers. I doubt Kolab intended to be a contractual responsibility, but rather letting customers know whose responsibility it is to make backups if the customer wants that.
- FooBarWidget 11y agoMost contracts aren't meant to be read be you, but by a lawyer. This is because it's almost impossible in normal language to accurately express the intention without opening tons of legal loopholes that can be abused in a court case. By the time you have written an exact specification that is 100% unambiguous, you have ended up with a contract that only lawyers can read. To draw a comparison, let's take a random HTML tutorial on the Internet. Pretty easy to read and lets you understand the gist of HTML. But it's too vague and ambiguous if you want to write a browser engine. So you need the formal HTML spec, which only experts can read. Writing a browser = court case. Formal HTML spec = contract.
- cmdrfred 11y agoI find being a programmer helps me with reading law. A lot of the time it's just a bunch of if this than that statements.
- Lawtonfogle 11y ago
- _lce0 11y agoCopy Right .... Creative Commons Terms of Service .... ? Innovators, please fill that gap
- Udo 11y agoCreative Commons licenses have simple tags communicating the modalities of each license quite clearly, and I believe the same can be done for Terms of Service. However, there are significant hurdles. I think a ToS Commons labeling scheme could be successful in providing TL;DR information for consumers, as an expression of intent followed up by the inevitable multitude of kilobytes expressing the same thing in legalese. This is also where the tosdr.org falls short as far as I can tell: instead of providing a list of tags that describe what the ToS in question mean, they apparently only rate them. That is not enough information to go on.
- theandrewbailey 11y agoEven though there are concrete bullet points for nearly all of these, more than half are "No Class Yet".
- aivosha 11y agoWould be nice to have ways to show similar services side by side showing their rating so user can decide which of the lesser evils to pick to use.
- learnstats2 11y agoSlightly bizarre and unhelpful that the site links to its discussions on Google Groups.
- michaelaiello 11y agohttp://www.privacyparrot.com http://www.privacyparrot.com Similar -> Uses Baysean classifier to classify privacy policies vs rely on humans maintaining. More coverage. Previous discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3222334 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3222334
- Animats 11y agoThat says "They do not sell your private information" for every site I tried - Google, Facebook, Pebble, etc. This includes "transunion.com", the credit reporting company whose business is selling your private information. Their classifier is fooled by legalese which starts with a general statement and then adds exceptions.
- reagency 11y agoThis is great. This link is here today because of a reedit.com/r/showerthoughts post wishijg for such a site, and tosdr got linked in the comments. Then someone reposted it to /r/internetisbeautiful. Both posts made reedit front page, and then an HNer reposted here. You have the much-maligned reedit frontpage community to thank for this.
- giltleaf 11y agoAnyone else notice that it ranks the terms of service for the chrome add on page as a C? Thought that was funny...
- zobzu 11y ago“I have read and agree to the Terms” is the biggest lie on the web "not just the web" ;)
- mcbrogrammer 11y agoThis website is a walking, talking advert for open source. If they have to foist a metric shit-ton of legalese onto you to grace you with the ability to use their offering, walk nay run away, find a freer alternative. Software wants to be free as in free from eulas ndas and tos!
- Leszek 11y agoHave you ever read through the entirety of GPLv3? It's pretty damn long: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html
- task_queue 11y agoAn end-user of software licensed under the GPLv3 doesn't ever have to read the license until they decide to modify and share it. At that point they should be well-versed in reading licensing agreements because they're touching others' source code.
- Leszek 11y agoFair point, but in that case free/open source is irrelevant: one could equally well build a closed-source app without a ToS, or an open source app with one.
- task_queue 11y agoI agree completely. I don't know what the OP was getting at.
- mschuster91 11y agoYeah, but the GPL is a pretty standard license and as such has many summarizations and tl;drs floating on the web. With company legalese, everyone has its own...
- belorn 11y agoLength doesn't really say anything about scope. I can take MIT license, one of the smallest and most permissive license out there, and add a single word which would make it incompatible with every other license in the world including itself. The only saving grace with FLOSS licenses is that they are not contracts, and only impacts those who seeks additional permission to distribute copies of a copyrighted word. If someone feel they don't understand the conditions which the license automatically grants permissions, they can always go directly to the author and ask them.
- mcescalante 11y agoThis site pops up here about once a year, and if I recall correctly, I often hear the sentiment of frustration with the whole way TOS works on the web. Here are 3 other past discussions HN has had about the site for anyone curious: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5888393 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5888393 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4373610 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4373610 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4350907 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4350907
- dang 11y agoIncluding in the last year [1], which makes this a dupe [2]. 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8394144 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8394144 2. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
- jancborchardt 11y agoWe could really need help from people who want to get involved, and just people who want to rate one site. Find out how to contribute here: https://tosdr.org/contribute.html https://tosdr.org/contribute.html Thanks! :)
- madez 11y agoSadly I must note that Pebble is not included. The last time I mentioned their ToS here on HN [1], Pebble changed them in less than 24 hours to leganese. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9615240 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9615240
- Animats 11y agoThat's bad, especially since it collects so much data about you. Do not attempt to remove the loyalty bracelet.
- jancborchardt 11y agoPlease do contribute :) https://tosdr.org/contribute.html https://tosdr.org/contribute.html
- Silhouette 11y agoAs laudable as the goal is, I always have the same reservations about this kind of site. Firstly, contracts and licence agreements can be complicated, and there is a real risk that "dumbing them down" in this way will misrepresent either what they actually say or their real impact given actual laws that are relevant. Of course these things can themselves vary significantly from one jurisdiction to the next. Secondly, there is always a risk that the information on the summary site becomes out of date. Thirdly, the choice of which points to highlight and whether to present them as positive or negative often seems rather arbitrary and perhaps guided by the preferences of the TOSDR operators. An example of being out of date would be the Steam entry, which says "No refund policy" despite this being changed a few days ago. As an example of the final point about subjectivity, several sites are given a thumbs down for claiming varying degrees of rights to content you upload, yet Wikipedia is given a thumbs up for publishing your content under a free licence. Given actual laws with regard to giving credit/claiming authorship (moral rights/author's right/your local equivalent if you have one) that exist in many jurisdictions in addition to the usual copyright provisions, I'm not sure I see a big difference here in practice. Several of the points raised, sometimes repeatedly, as negatives are also routine in B2C contracts and indeed probably necessary for the services to provide their intended functions -- the ability to change terms, for example, or transferring users' data in the event of an exit. In many jurisdictions there are legal safeguards that would allow for challenging unreasonable TOS changes or disclosures regardless of what any terms say, but the idea that any commercial service is going to fix its terms for all eternity with no mechanism for changing them even with notice is just silly (not to mention legally impossible almost everywhere), as is the idea that a business will promise not to transfer data about its users to any new owner.
- JoergR 11y ago"- Google can use your content for all their existing and future services" That's the basis of some of the strongest services offered on the Web, if that"s deemed negative, this service is not for me.
- SeanLuke 11y agoThis project has been going on for three years now, and they've still not gotten to Facebook, Apple, Amazon, or Yahoo. Okay. I would have expected hundreds of assessments at this point. Not twelve.
- arihant 11y agoThere are way more than 12 on their site. It does have Facebook.
- SeanLuke 11y agoFacebook: "NO CLASS YET. We haven't sufficiently reviewed the terms yet. Please contribute to our group: Get involved." This is what you mean? So far as I can tell there are exactly twelve assessments since 2012. *Edit. Let me be tougher. There have only been two new assessments in the past two years. There have only been five new assessments since the first Wayback Machine snapshot of the page (October 2012).
- jancborchardt 11y agoWe are an open source effort and all our main folks have other things to do. Despite the popularity the project gets and however much people like it, there’s not a big influx of community contributors. If you want to get involved, please see https://tosdr.org/contribute.html https://tosdr.org/contribute.html – thank you!