
Terms of Service; Didn't Read - ryanio
http://tos-dr.info/
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bpierre
Posted 5 days ago, comments: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4350907>

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alagu
Strange. Does HN allow posting same link twice?

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taylorfausak
No. A common method to defeat it is adding useless parameters to the URL (like
"?1"). I think this case was a genuine mistake, though. This submission has no
"www." but the one from five days ago does. (Edit: ludwigvan beat me to the
punch by a few seconds.)

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DanBC
I welcome this and I hope more people use it.

Unfortunately, companies pay lawyers to come up with incomprehensible
AUP/TOS/etc, and those lawyers are unlikely to want to allow the company to
use a "generic" document, even if it is very high quality.

There are some ridiculous terms and conditions in some documents, and I'm not
sure if any of them have ever been tested in courts.

I'm keen to see how this team can overcome international differences in law to
create a simple but effective ToS.

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grabeh
As far as I can tell, the plan isn't to create a standardised document but
rather to provide greater transparency over existing TOS.

In terms of court testing, one example is the OFT in the UK requesting that
Apple make changes to its terms which were considered to be in breach of UK
legislation.

<http://www.oft.gov.uk/news-and-updates/press/2009/136-09>

I don't think the objective is to create incomprehensible terms. In fact I am
confident that if most people had the time/inclination to read the TOS, they
would understand them. The problem is that their length obviously puts people
off, which is where the project comes in.

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rradu
All the ones I really care about--Twitter, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Google--
don't have a class yet (what does that even mean?).

Regardless, this is great for a quick summary of what you're agreeing to (or
already agreed to).

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darkpicnic
TOSSOS.com has been doing this for a while. It also has a Chrome plugin. Check
it out and if you know anyone who wants to help, email hello@tossos.com

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chalst
There's a Chrome app for tos;dr as well:

    
    
      https://github.com/shybyte/tos-checker
    

(You have to install it by hand, so remember you need to be in Chrome's
developer mode).

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arkitaip
There's a Swedish project called CommonTerms that also tackles user agreements
from a usability POV <http://www.commonterms.net/>

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lazyjones
Great initiative, but at a glance the results seem biased towards Google (no
mention of issues around the new unified accounts, complaints about youtube
realnames etc.).

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SudarshanP
Do any of the ToS websites use <http://hypothes.is/> for annotation?

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chalst
I don't think hypothes.is have rolled out any system yet.

