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

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81–90 of 191 posts

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

#81
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.

I think the spirt of the statement still works if you move the incompetence up when level so something along the lines of ~"It is spectacular how incompetent that the law allows confused/convoluted communication to act as protection to the company hired the lawyers to produce said communication."

It seems like society would be better off if the law were set up to where only when clear communication has happened that the lawyer would bring benefit to their employer.

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

#82
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

If your point is that its use is invalid here, then say why.

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

#83

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.

More or less you should assume that any consumer contract promises you exactly the minimum allowable within the framework of applicable laws. That is the intent.

Practically what this means is that it is useless to negotiate with big companies or really even read their terms (unless you have skills to spot errors) - the best one can do is support campaigns for expanded privacy laws, consumer rights etc.

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

#84

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.

More or less you should assume that any consumer contract promises you exactly the minimum allowable within the framework of applicable laws. That is the intent. Practically what this means is that it is useless to negotiate with big companies or really even read their terms (unless you have skills to spot errors) - the best one can do is support campaigns for expanded privacy laws, consumer rights etc.

That seems to summarize it and is my take as well except that you can negotiate with them to an extent as you can avoid that product and this can have an effect if you can also convince other people of doing so. Sure, usually people don’t care (or think they have no choice), but sometimes they do care enough to at least push alternatives as seen in the cases of twitter and reddit.

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

#85

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 crazy how unreasonable the world of law is. Just some days ago, I installed some game (Assassins Creed I think?) and it had 3 agreements to read, each one a kilometer long (just a figure of speech). Really? To play a game? Of course nobody reads them and just press Accept.

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

#87
post #76
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/#...

What is this then? https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/org/src/branch/main/TermsOfUse...

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

#88
post #85

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 crazy how unreasonable the world of law is. Just some days ago, I installed some game (Assassins Creed I think?) and it had 3 agreements to read, each one a kilometer long (just a figure of speech). Really? To play a game? Of course nobody reads them and just press Accept.

What I do is spot check, i.e. open an agreement, pick two or three spots at random, and do my best to read and understand those. My hope is if just 1000 people did that, they’d be able to collectively spot unexpected/unacceptable terms and make them public.

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

#89
post #50

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.

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

Hobson's Choice is not something to be celebrated.

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

#90
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is crazy how unreasonable the world of law is. Just some days ago, I installed some game (Assassins Creed I think?) and it had 3 agreements to read, each one a kilometer long (just a figure of speech). Really? To play a game? Of course nobody reads them and just press Accept.

What I do is spot check, i.e. open an agreement, pick two or three spots at random, and do my best to read and understand those. My hope is if just 1000 people did that, they’d be able to collectively spot unexpected/unacceptable terms and make them public.

Good idea. I might start doing this
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