
Terms of Service, Didn't Read - hunglee2
https://tosdr.org/?repost
======
mcescalante
This 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
Including 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)

------
belorn
Even 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
Most 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.

~~~
Lawtonfogle
The problem is that we allow for consent to a contract to be valid. There are
people who cannot afford lawyers for all the contracts they sign going about
their daily lives. When I go to the doctor, when I buy insurance, when I get a
phone... I am in effect being forced to agree to contracts that I cannot
understand (doctor is a medical need, insurance is mandated under penalty of
law, cellphone is a want, but it is really close to a need if you are trying
to do a lot of things like getting a job).

Either uninformed consent counts or courts need to start saying these
contracts were not given informed consent.

~~~
FooBarWidget
That's why some jurisdictions, e.g. certain civil law countries, limit the
amount of stuff you can do in a contract in a business-to-consumer context.
For example, in the Netherlands, all business-to-consumer contracts must
follow the principle of "reasonableness & fairness". I can't give you an exact
definition, but a "gut definition" is that if the judge looks at it and his
gut feeling is "this is bullshit", then the contract is probably not legally
binding. For example, as a consumer, you cannot agree that you have to sell
your house to the other party for $10 if you fail to pay for the $30 service
within 20 days. That would be an unreasonable claim.

Business-to-business transactions are however not subject to such protections.
You can put anything you want in a contract (including unreasonable clauses)
as long as it doesn't violate any laws.

The US is a common law country and as far as I know doesn't have this
"reasonableness & fairness" principle for business-to-consumer contracts. In
contrast to civil law countries, where judges tend to look at the spirit of
the contract, common law country judges look at the letter of the contract.
That's why old ladies can sue McDonalds when they burn their tongue on hot
coffee. "Hey it's not written anywhere that I should be careful with hot
coffee". And that's why US businesses have to put literally everything in
contracts.

~~~
mdpopescu
I agree with the spirit of what you're saying /grin but incidentally, you
might want to read the details on the McDonalds coffee case:
[http://www.lectlaw.com/files/cur78.htm](http://www.lectlaw.com/files/cur78.htm)

~~~
nodata
_yawn_ not this again.

[http://realestatelawnh.com/index.php/injuries-to-
children/5-...](http://realestatelawnh.com/index.php/injuries-to-
children/5-frontpage-columns/column1/49-mcdonalds-hot-coffee-case-debunked)

------
MrBoomixer
This has been around for a long while. It's in need of much love from online
communities.

~~~
eterm
Reaching the frontpage of /r/all yesterday should help that part.

------
eridal

        Copy Right       .... Creative Commons
        Terms of Service .... ?
    

Innovators, please fill that gap

~~~
Udo
Creative 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.

------
mcbrogrammer
This 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
Have 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
An 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
Fair 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
I agree completely. I don't know what the OP was getting at.

------
Silhouette
As 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.

------
zobzu
“I have read and agree to the Terms” is the biggest lie on the web

"not just the web" ;)

------
empyrical
There's also this similar website which seems to be mainly used for software
licenses

[https://tldrlegal.com](https://tldrlegal.com)

~~~
kefka
When 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
As 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
Are you baffled when you run an open source application and the GPL pops up?

~~~
coldpie
I 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
I'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.

------
michaelaiello
[http://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
That 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
This 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.

------
theandrewbailey
Even though there are concrete bullet points for nearly all of these, more
than half are "No Class Yet".

------
madez
Sadly 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)

~~~
jancborchardt
Please do contribute :)
[https://tosdr.org/contribute.html](https://tosdr.org/contribute.html)

------
lucaspottersky
surprisingly Stackoverflow isn't listed there yet... :P

------
aivosha
Would 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.

------
giltleaf
Anyone else notice that it ranks the terms of service for the chrome add on
page as a C? Thought that was funny...

------
learnstats2
Slightly bizarre and unhelpful that the site links to its discussions on
Google Groups.

------
SeanLuke
This 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
There are way more than 12 on their site. It does have Facebook.

~~~
SeanLuke
Facebook: "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
We 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!

