
Terms of Service; Didn't Read - rfreytag
http://tosdr.org/
======
belorn
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§

~~~
seferphier
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.

~~~
belorn
Since QoS/ToS is a primarly unenforceable contract meant for a global market,
a service that points out the different kinds of unenforceable contracts is a
praiseworthy service, but with somewhat limited use.

> _You cannot get away from a contract by simply not reading it_

Well, in Swedish law, quite a lot weight is given to the circumstances around
the contract, and if it was made in good faith. Take people who sends out
false bills, relying on people who do not read the letter fully and see that
it actually was not a bill but an "offer of service". That is still fraud, and
people who pay those bills without reading it can still get away from the
"contract". This might be different in UK, Germany, any of the state laws in
US and so on. Maybe some of the 27,000 pages of federal law has something
about it, but I am not a US lawyer. The laws are so old that what exactly can
nullify a contract in one country will likely be different from an other.

> _The courts and the legislature have to balance between interfering with the
> freedom of contract and the notion of fairness._

This is an area where laws are likely to be very different between countries.
It touches on consumer protection, as well as contract law. The Swedish law is
very unspecific here, and just generically defines that unjust terms are
grounds enough to nullify a contract either in parts or in full. The consumer
protection laws goes a bit further, and declares that the party offering a
service must make sure that the consumer is fully informed about the terms,
and must also make sure that the consumer is benefited from agreeing to the
contracts and all its terms. If not, then the consumer has a right to nullify
the contract and get back any money already paid. For the bank example, this
mean that the bank must make sure the consumer is aware of the costs involved
before signing, and the the rates are within reasonable levels. If they tried
to get someone to agree to a 1000% interest loan, the contract would be almost
guaranteed to be nullified in court if challenged.

~~~
seferphier
Yeah, I am talking about Common Law in general.

Interestingly, consumer protection aspect you talk about is very similar.
Stronger protection is given to consumers through legislation - eg: Sales of
Goods Act in UK. The word "reasonable" is ingrained into common law and a
1000% interest loan would certainly not be reasonable.

>You cannot get away from a contract by simply not reading it All
circumstances around the contract would be considered in common law. I believe
the courts would rather void the term on the basis of unfairness rather than
putting weight on the fact that the person did not read it.

Contract is binding even if you have not read the contract is a very important
cornerstone of contract law. Almost everyone that signs the contract does not
read the contract - even contract that exceeds billions of dollars. They turn
to their lawyers to read and negotiate the terms. Complex and specific terms
are required to specify the rights and obligation of each side. If we are
forced to read the contract before we sign them, our society would not be able
to operate and many disputes would arise over overly broad terms that can be
interpreted in many different ways.

~~~
sageikosa
> a 1000% interest loan would certainly not be reasonable.

Some payday loans calculated APR is in the high hundreds of percentages (like
600%+). Lenders are often required by law to report the APR even though the
terms of the loan may only be for a few weeks worth of time, causing the
inflated APR.

Payday loans, however, are generally held to be enforceable contracts.

------
rossjudson
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
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
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.

~~~
Silhouette
_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._

Which unfortunately destroys the Internet until that happens. Businesses
typically don't enjoy the benefit of the doubt and consumer protection laws
that their customers usually do when those customers sign up with a standard
form contract where they have little if any power to negotiate. If a business
offering a product or service isn't able to define reasonable terms to clarify
what the deal is then that business can't transact with customers without
accepting an absurd amount of risk or without negotiating individually with
each customer at prohibitive cost.

When we did the terms for a UK business not so long ago, we were advised that
things like hiding potentially unexpected terms away could weaken those terms
if we ever tried to enforce them, while if certain terms that are reasonable
but not necessarily obvious are emphasized then this can strengthen their
enforceability. Also, there are some basic legal standards that any such
contract would have to meet, e.g., where consumer protection laws say that
certain kinds of term are completely prohibited.

This seems a reasonable fundamental policy: whoever is writing the terms can't
rely on unreasonable conditions, and if there's something reasonable but
possibly unexpected then it's in their interests to draw attention to it
explicitly, but assuming they do those things their terms should be expected
to stand up in court if necessary.

------
johnnygoods
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
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
That's assuming that this post is linked to him/her and comes back to haunt
later.

------
jancborchardt
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.

~~~
mikegagnon
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.

~~~
quadrangle
You don't even bother with AdBlock? C'mon. You can always whitelist sites
where you support the ads. Ghostery is good (essential?) too.

~~~
jancborchardt
Ghostery is proprietary though. I recommend
[http://disconnect.me](http://disconnect.me) instead.

Also, HTTPS Everywhere [http://eff.org/https-everywhere](http://eff.org/https-
everywhere)

------
pikewood
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.

------
Sami_Lehtinen
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.

------
seferphier
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
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. :)

------
ef4
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
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)

------
thom
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)

------
jchung
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
[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
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.

------
olegp
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
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
OK, will be in touch.

------
natch
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
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.«

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

~~~
Skalman
Scroll down to see the ratings of some popular sites' ToS. The extension shows
you that same rating when visiting a website.

------
mcovey
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
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
> “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.

------
tonydiv
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
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.

------
graylights
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
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)

------
simonbrown
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
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)

------
makepanic
previous discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4350907](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4350907)

looks like they got a new domain

------
chacham15
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
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)
)

------
weisser
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
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.

------
cLeEOGPw
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
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.

------
vysakh0
This is one of the best needed extension. Also this gets user some idea on how
each site treats users.

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

------
Pherdnut
This is brilliant.

------
gesman
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
This comparison is uncalled for and demeaning. Please refrain from posting
sexist jokes which add nothing to the discussion.

~~~
gesman
It's not a joke. It's life. Get on it.

~~~
hugoroy
Funny. You should have read the Y Combinator Hacker News Guidelines:

"Be civil."

[http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

------
cybernoodles
Of all sites, no ToS on Facebook available?

~~~
i_cannot_hack
[http://tosdr.org/#facebook](http://tosdr.org/#facebook)

~~~
jancborchardt
And the rating is nearly done, the class should be up in a few days.

------
Tangaroa
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
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
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
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.

