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The ‘Terms and Conditions’ Reckoning Is Coming

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Re: The ‘Terms and Conditions’ Reckoning Is Coming

#151

Post by kbenson »

cptskippy wrote: post #135
kbenson wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think allowing programs to be specified in plain English is a good idea? We have "legalese" for the same reason we have programming languages. Terms have specific, sometimes slightly different or more narrow meanings to promote better understanding of intent in languages meant to specify a set of rules. Specifying laws in "plain English" makes about as much sense to me as programming in English. You'll quickly…

> We have "legalese" for the same reason we have programming languages. The intended purpose of "legalease" is to eliminate ambiguity and to clearly outline terms and conditions, however it's often used to introduce ambiguity and obfuscate the actual intent of terms and conditions or to redefine existing known and understood laws. "Legalese" is a programming language that allows unsafe pointers. It's compiler not onl…

> The intended purpose of "legalease" is to eliminate ambiguity and to clearly outline terms and conditions, however it's often used to introduce ambiguity and obfuscate the actual intent of terms and conditions or to redefine existing known and understood laws.

Brief plain English would be about as bad. English with similar verbosity would be much worse. Obfuscating meaning in colloquial English is so trivial it happens on accident when communicating through text on a regular basis.

I'm not arguing that legalese is good, I'm just arguing that it's better than English, specifically because terms have been carved out over time to mean very specific things when used in a legal contract, and that provides for less ambiguity. It does require foreknowledge, but so does every sufficiently complex topic.

> "Legalese" is a programming language that allows unsafe pointers.

With regard to clarity, if legalese is C, English is dictating pseudocode to someone else who is translating to assembly on-the-fly.

> Pretty much everything we advocate against in a programming language is permitted and encouraged in "legalese".

So let's make it better! But coming up with a more specific legal language will require even more training to understand than is currently required, and that's the opposite of making it easily understood by the average person.

My own comparison would be that Legalese is like Perl. It is familiar enough that most laypeople can look at it and get a good idea of what's going on, but it's definitely easy to write in a way that is nigh incomprehensible, either by accident on on purpose. In addition, the familiar appearance of the language hides some advanced conceptual differences that bite the unaware (context in Perl, specific meanings of common terms in legalese).

A new version of legalese might be more akin to Rust or Haskell. Very specific, very exact, but it requires much more up-front learning to understand exactly how everything works and what it means.

In other words, the learning curve would be steeper but the dividends paid for learning it would be greater.

Re: The ‘Terms and Conditions’ Reckoning Is Coming

#152

Post by kenning »

mmcconnell1618 wrote: post #138
bobm_kite9 wrote: post #2

What I want is a standardized set of icons, which grant or deny specific things, that all websites can agree on, sort of like the ones available for software licensing, here: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/ It would be great if we could "standardize away" the whole T&C fiasco.

We have standardized nutritional labels in the United States and I would like to see a similar standard for terms and conditions. Icons could be part of it but also leave room for text and listing of what common data (email, ip, name, etc.) the service will collect and how they will use it.

This is a great idea

Re: The ‘Terms and Conditions’ Reckoning Is Coming

#153

Post by reificator »

moate wrote: post #137
kbenson wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think allowing programs to be specified in plain English is a good idea? We have "legalese" for the same reason we have programming languages. Terms have specific, sometimes slightly different or more narrow meanings to promote better understanding of intent in languages meant to specify a set of rules. Specifying laws in "plain English" makes about as much sense to me as programming in English. You'll quickly…

But code allows for Plain English: Comments. And nobody writes code without clear comments right? Right? Dear god please tell me you people aren't doing that!?

Depends on what it is and how complex it is. Depends on how explicit the variables and functions can be named. Depends on whether the thing I want to express is a how or a why or a how to use. Depends on if it's a public API or an internal helper used in one place with an unambiguous name. Depends on whether the audience are first year CS students, 50 year old business majors, senior developers with years of experience, or all of the above.

Always do X, never do Y rules are rarely helpful.

Does the comment here really help with your understanding of the code? If you're just now being exposed to programming then it's not enough detail, if you've been programming for 20 years it's far too much noise.

    // Assigns the value of the expression 4 + 5 to x
    // where 4 and 5 are integer literals
    // and + represents the mathematical process known as addition.
    // This allows us to later refer to x by name, where it will be replaced by the value defined here.
    x = 4 + 5;

Re: The ‘Terms and Conditions’ Reckoning Is Coming

#154

Post by everyone »

As far as I'm aware those type of contracts do not hold up in court. (At least here in Ireland) Its well known by both parties that in 99% of cases the consumer will just click 'agree' without reading it in order to get access. So as far as the judge is concerned it doesnt exist.

Re: The ‘Terms and Conditions’ Reckoning Is Coming

#155

Post by kenning »

bencollier49 wrote: post #149

Hilarious. Bloomberg harp on about GDPR but their own cookie notice violates it by using assumed consent and tying consent to use.

Oh my god, can we have one article on this topic without this comment? The whole problem is that 99% of websites people visit come with trackers.

Re: The ‘Terms and Conditions’ Reckoning Is Coming

#156

Post by jabv »

mooneater wrote: post #47

True of legalese in contracts, but also Law in general has multiplied like Gremlins. Hammurabi's code of laws, was written in common language, and was brief enough every subject could understand them. It makes no sense that we should be subject to a volume of law that we could never even read, let alone understand. Musk is correct in insisting that laws should expire, and it should be easier to remove a law than add…

This perspective on the bible and Latin is not a good analogy. Most people could not read any language long ago, and priests in general serve several other purposes before reading/expounding upon the bible. From the standpoint of a believer, the bible was not expanded by human decision as laws are (canonical vs. apocryphal discussions aside). The bible was compiled in Latin by Jerome because it was the common ('vulgar') language of the people.

Of course, there's plenty to discuss and argue about in all of the above, but your comparison makes it seem like a done deal.

Re: The ‘Terms and Conditions’ Reckoning Is Coming

#157

Post by WhyNotHugo »

jkaplowitz wrote: post #121
jstarfish wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? What's so bad about forcing us to re-evaluate the reasons why given laws are on the books? Plenty of laws are relevant only to a specific point in time, but they rarely, if ever, get repealed. Take the US Chicken Tax. It was put in place in the 60s to deal with economic concerns with France and West Germany at the time (which no longer exists as such!). Why shouldn't it have been given an expiration date? Instea…

Some laws, like that one, should be enacted with an expiration date. Some laws even are - e.g. a lot of the post-9/11 surveillance state laws need periodic reauthorization. Plenty of other taxes are enacted as temporary, too, despite how routinely they're extended. But not all laws should expire. Having, say, the crime of murder expire would be quite unhelpful.

> But not all laws should expire. Having, say, the crime of murder expire would be quite unhelpful.

I'm pretty sure that laws like that one would be renewed before expiration anyway -- and the current context would allow re-evaluation of penalty as well, which might be something useful to reconsider every couple of decades.

Re: The ‘Terms and Conditions’ Reckoning Is Coming

#158

Post by dhimes »

everyone wrote: post #154

As far as I'm aware those type of contracts do not hold up in court. (At least here in Ireland) Its well known by both parties that in 99% of cases the consumer will just click 'agree' without reading it in order to get access. So as far as the judge is concerned it doesnt exist.

Zuckerberg admitted as much.

Re: The ‘Terms and Conditions’ Reckoning Is Coming

#160

Post by mhneu »

Yes. There are two separate issues here, I think.

1. When corporations "negotiate" with consumers, this is an abuse of the legal system. Contract law was conceived for situations where both parties have at least some amount of negotiating power. Handing a consumer some long contract written by a set of well-paid lawyers, and asking them to sign it or walk away from any benefit from a product, is not the kind of contract we want in our society. In the past, we've used group association - collective bargaining, class action lawsuits, etc. - to solve this problem of many consumers, each with almost no power, negotiating with a big corporation with all the power. Arbitration clauses, and non-competes, are often examples of abuse of this power imbalance. This situation is the kind of thing government exists to do - solve problems for its citizens by working collectively. So perhaps regulation is also a remedy.

2. Informed consent, vs. terms-and-conditions consent. Click-through agreements with many pages, written by a legal team, in which the alternative for the consumer is to walk away, cannot be seen as informed consent by the consumer. When Facebook asks users to click "yes" for disclaiming privacy rights, that's not informed consent. We already have a definition of informed consent in scientific experiments, and it requires understanding every word of the consent and no penalties for saying no. (If a scientist offers subjects $10 for participating, the scientist must pay that $10 to anyone who declines the consent form.) Consent forms must evolve to match informed consent in science.

If as a society we deal with these two issues, we'll be in a much better place, and we'll be dealing with wealth concentration (into the hands of corporations), a key issue for our time.

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