

Startup idea: Do we value our laundry more than our privacy? - atldev
http://clearsignal.posterous.com/do-we-value-our-laundry-more-than-our-privacy

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newbusox
Coming from a law background this makes me, and I imagine many lawyers,
nervous. Terms of Service agreements may be wordy and hard to understand, but
they're also substantive--everything in them has meaning. Good lawyers should
craft them to be as concise (and readable to lay people) as humanely possible,
and there's no reason to believe that the lawyers that draft ToS agreements,
particularly for highly profitable businesses, have done anything but that.

Even if you have a normal ToS and then try to abbreviate it, you have a host
of issues: which one would control? You could explicitly say, "the normal ToS
controls in the case of a conflict between the ToS and an abbreviated
version," but, if people, don't read the normal ToS because there is an
abbreviated version, is it really conscionable to say that the normal ToS
would control? If the abbreviated controls, there have to be many caveats:
like "We own everything you upload... unless you didn't own it to begin with,
in which case, we don't own it, and you guarantee to us that you have the
right to use it, and you give us the right to use it," or "There are no
warranties, except if this statement itself is unenforceable (which is true in
some states), in which case we disclaim all warranties to the extent
applicable by law, and in the event this is unconscionable or found
unenforceable, the rest of this agreement is still enforceable" etc etc. Once
you're in that land, you've obviously lost the point of abbreviating it.

~~~
steve-howard
Is having a summary on a ToS any different than the Creative Commons deed vs.
legalese? (cf. the disclaimer on <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/>
).

~~~
newbusox
It looks like Creative Commons tries to protect themselves with their
disclaimer, which says that their deed has no legal value. I suppose a summary
which similarly had no legal value would at least inform users about what the
company does (which would be good) but, in the case of a lawsuit, if someone
misunderstood the summary (or whatever), they're out of luck. And, anyhow,
lawyers are taught to be risk averse. The more they have to think about and
worry about the legal complications of something, the more they don't want it
to happen. So, for places like Google, or whoever, adding increased
readability even in a comparable "deed" would probably come at the cost of
their legal department being very upset: and you can bet the second they got
sued and the issue of some conflict between the summary/deed and the actual
ToS came up is the second they would take that summary down.

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dave1010uk
Mozilla introduced "Privacy Icons" (<https://wiki.mozilla.org/Privacy_Icons>)
a few months ago, which seems to have the same goals.

The main problem I see is that if these icons are just opt in, why would a
company use them if it wasn't respecting a user's privacy? It would be similar
to a website having a badge that proudly says "Invalid XHTML".

P3P (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P3P>) tries to address a similar problem
but in a machine-readable way.

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michaelaiello
A few months ago, we put together <http://www.privacyparrot.com> which uses
machine learning to try to classify what's in a privacy policy. (right now
just trying to determine if a site sells your data or not). I am unfortunately
confident that there isn't a viable business model in selling people online
privacy for free services.

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Shank
Sounds a bit like the android permissions model applied to the web. I wouldn't
mind it, but I doubt many people would pay attention to these more than they
would the permissions they ignore when they add apps to their phones, or when
they add a new Facebook app.

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rickmb
At a risk at repeatedly beating the same dead horse: outside the US privacy
valued highly as a civil right, and is heavily protected by law. The same
countries also typically have strong consumer protection. Warning labels alone
are meaningless there.

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bdg
Inconvenient reality alert:

I can promise you that many companies in the wild actively violate their own
TOS, knowingly or unknowingly. I can promise you that you will never find out
about all of those cases, even after there's a data breach.

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malandrew
I really like this idea. I would add info about how long certain data is
retained.

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atldev
Update: olefoo pointed out in the Pinterest thread that this has been tried
apparently. Updated post to reflect.

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skrebbel
It's a great idea, but how is it a startup idea? Not every good project is
necessarily a business.

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lifestyleigni
Have you seen <http://safeshepherd.com/> ?

~~~
Shank
It incorrectly identified me twice, and apparently I'm subject to identity
theft because one of the instances it found included "me" in the white pages.

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steve-howard
I thoroughly expected this post to advocate free laundry with the caveat that
we receive underwear-related advertisements.

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drivebyacct2
I hope that readers or anyone wanting to pursue this idea disregard the last
sentence, or at least the "confirmed site logo" bit. How on earth could these
things be confirmed by a third party and what information would a "confirmed
site" badget convey? Sounds even flimsier than the "secured by <random
antivirus>" or "secure SSL guaranteed" nonsense.

Given the legal concerns and the skew that attempting profitability would
have, I'd rather just see this adopted by projects voluntarily. But even then,
if it becomes mainstream to expect a "privacy ticker", there's still nothing
to keep companies from selectively disclosing or straight up lying.

