Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Why did Microsoft, Meta, and PayPal update their ToS today?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 191 posts

Re: Ask HN: Why did Microsoft, Meta, and PayPal update their ToS today?

#71

Post by bandergirl »

mihaaly wrote: post #70
kramerger wrote: post #43

I tried to read some of them to see what has changed. I really tried... If any lawyers from the future are reading this: It was impossible for me to see what I was agreeing to. Furthermore, I was not given a chance to not agree with these (unknown) changes.

It is spectacular how incompetent lawyers are providing service to the public that pays them eventually, they are only able to communicate to other lawyers, so why should we use their services at all? We can get into trouble without them the same easy being cluless either way.

Lawyers are not paid to provide a service to the public, you got that mixed up. They’re writing code to protect the company that hired them. The language used by the law is not the common language because the latter is prone to bugs.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Microsoft, Meta, and PayPal update their ToS today?

#73

Post by HeavyStorm »

bandergirl wrote: post #71
mihaaly wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is spectacular how incompetent lawyers are providing service to the public that pays them eventually, they are only able to communicate to other lawyers, so why should we use their services at all? We can get into trouble without them the same easy being cluless either way.

Lawyers are not paid to provide a service to the public, you got that mixed up. They’re writing code to protect the company that hired them. The language used by the law is not the common language because the latter is prone to bugs.

Their embellished way of writing also is. But being cryptic to the general population has its benefits - to them, of course.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Microsoft, Meta, and PayPal update their ToS today?

#74

Post by HeavyStorm »

jddj wrote: post #64
throwaway290 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If this is your work account then switching is down to your employer and they probably have a legal dept to understand all ToS anyway. But any ToS change shouldn't affect you much because you shouldn't be using it for personal stuff.

I don't think the venn diagram of companies using outlook/office365 and companies with a well resourced legal department has as much overlap as one might hope

It doesn't. I know companies with as little as 3 people who are Microsoft business users, of course.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Microsoft, Meta, and PayPal update their ToS today?

#75

Post by uptie »

janalsncm wrote: post #68
Zetice wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The answer to this is to not agree to it (your “chance” is to stop using the service).

This “solution” is a non-starter. People like to imagine that we have a marketplace with degrees of freedom in all directions, but we don’t. We have to make choices, and often that just means choosing the least bad option. But it is interesting to note how we got here. https://www.npr.org/2023/07/13/1187543648/terms-and-conditio... To summarize the podcast episode, contracts used to be individually tailored, but busi…

Non starter is a term often overused

Re: Ask HN: Why did Microsoft, Meta, and PayPal update their ToS today?

#76

Post by oever »

jupp0r wrote: post #21
thephyber wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

VisualPing already does this: https://visualping.io/blog/how-to-monitor-changes-in-terms-a... Docacracy did it a decade ago, but closed shop. The problem isn’t the tech — it’s coming up with a business model that pays for the system and upkeep. As much as people give lip service about privacy, they sure don’t throw money at lobbying efforts that protect their rights in those areas.

You can build this with what Github offers for free to open source projects.

Catch 22: first agree to the Microsoft GitHub ToS.

Or you can use a friendlier service like the one provided by Codeberg.

https://docs.codeberg.org/getting-started/what-is-codeberg/#...

Re: Ask HN: Why did Microsoft, Meta, and PayPal update their ToS today?

#77

Post by unyttigfjelltol »

mihaaly wrote: post #70
kramerger wrote: post #43

I tried to read some of them to see what has changed. I really tried... If any lawyers from the future are reading this: It was impossible for me to see what I was agreeing to. Furthermore, I was not given a chance to not agree with these (unknown) changes.

It is spectacular how incompetent lawyers are providing service to the public that pays them eventually, they are only able to communicate to other lawyers, so why should we use their services at all? We can get into trouble without them the same easy being cluless either way.

I've tried reading unannotated C and C++ and it's really hard. The problem with reading code is you're anticipating all kinds of input that doesn't necessarily exist at the time of review, and the code communicates not with a person but a code interpreter that reads in a hyper-precise and idiosyncratic way.

Annotations don't work with legal code because there is a real risk the interpreter might use the escaped comments unexpectedly as production code(!). Imagine your C and C++ comments could generate production errors. You probably wouldn't use them much.

There's an argument for giving people a sheet of hypothetical inputs and projected code outputs when we're talking contracts. Biz gives you the 'code' and then in a separate sheet say: hypothetically, a shady backwater adtech company asks for your mother's maiden name; are we allowed to sell it without further consent? And then they give the code output: "Yes, we can do whatever we want." And they go through a list of these hypothetical.

The counterargument is such a sheet could be even more mind-numbing and unwieldy than the original code if not written in an entirely new spirit.

And FWIW, my personal view is that these 70-page contracts of adhesion are a travesty, an evolutionary step, and a weak fiction at this point. The industry does not have a right to force 3 months of mandatory bedtime reading for their userbase every few months, the whole thing is broken and we're all just waiting for courts to coalesce around a better model.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Microsoft, Meta, and PayPal update their ToS today?

#79

Post by withinboredom »

pwdisswordfishc wrote: post #46
1-6 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like where this discussion is headed. Scrape the ToS and keep a record of that. Are ToS's copywrited?

Yes, at some point someone has probably written a copy.

I thought contracts can’t be copyrighted? There is too much similarity between them for it to make any sense.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Microsoft, Meta, and PayPal update their ToS today?

#80

Post by omneity »

kingkongjaffa wrote: post #4

Project idea: host version controlled TOS copies from companies to see what changes each time.

You can use https://monitoro.co to monitor and extract TOS, and send the changes to a webhook that does whatever you want with the data :)

Disclaimer, I work on Monitoro.

Post reply on HN