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ToS;DR — TL;DR for Terms of Service and Privacy Policy

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Re: ToS;DR — TL;DR for Terms of Service and Privacy Policy

#51

Post by rmc »

aresant wrote: post #18

Great concept and smart execution. A suggestion - rather than rating "A" through "E" why not change to the more recognizable (for US audience at least) scale of "A through F" (A/B/C/D/F) which we're all mercilessly trained to recognize through years of school grades? "E" as your worst rating confused me at first glance - could be interpreted as "Excellent"

Wait the US doesn't have an 'E'? (Is 'F' short for Fail? I thought it was just the continuation of the sequence). Regardless, at least A is best, B is worse than that, etc. which makes sense.

Re: ToS;DR — TL;DR for Terms of Service and Privacy Policy

#53

Post by hugoroy »

lovskogen wrote: post #47
aresant wrote: post #18

Great concept and smart execution. A suggestion - rather than rating "A" through "E" why not change to the more recognizable (for US audience at least) scale of "A through F" (A/B/C/D/F) which we're all mercilessly trained to recognize through years of school grades? "E" as your worst rating confused me at first glance - could be interpreted as "Excellent"

I vouch for a more international 5-star system.

actually the original inspiration was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_energy_label

Re: ToS;DR — TL;DR for Terms of Service and Privacy Policy

#54

Post by chrismonsanto »

Given how open source projects are increasingly using GitHub as the canonical repository, I'm a bit disappointed that they can refuse you service for any reason at all. I want to believe that the GH guys are good people and were just lazy here.

So, +1 for tos-dr for letting me know, and a potential extra +1 if they help us get GH to change this policy. I'm going to let them know this matters to me, I hope others here will as well.

Re: ToS;DR — TL;DR for Terms of Service and Privacy Policy

#55

Post by jasonkester »

Seems a bit biased in places. One of the example sites has a big scary red X next to "Deleted images are not really deleted", despite that being an important feature for any site that lets users delete their own content.

It's one of those tradeoffs you make where you trade a tiny fraction of risk (e.g., that somebody might break into your system and steal the exact cat photo that one high profile blogger was embarrassed to have uploaded) so that you can have an easy fix for the dozens of emails you get each month from people who accidentally deleted the wrong photo and can't believe you deleted it even though I told you to and I'll sue you because that's ILLEGAL!

Definitely not worthy of a big red X against your site, since it's the only sensible choice.

Re: ToS;DR — TL;DR for Terms of Service and Privacy Policy

#56

Post by chrismonsanto »

kibwen wrote: post #13
hugoroy wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, trust is one problem. I think we're being objective (at least we are trying, with building a scoring system that's automatic). But for sure, we are not being neutral. We do think that tracking should always be opt-in, not opt-out. At least, we're working in total transparency and it's an open process. I hope that helps.

Re: neutrality, I'm delighted to see that your perspectives align with mine. Dubious legal terms deserve to be called out. And the transparency is nice, but... well, if I'm too lazy to read a 50-page legal document, I hope I don't have to sift through a 50-page mailing list thread just to establish confidence in the summary of the document itself. :)

Shouldn't be much of a problem if the summaries quote relevant passages. You can just Ctrl-F and see if your intuition agrees with theirs.

Re: ToS;DR — TL;DR for Terms of Service and Privacy Policy

#57

Post by hugoroy »

rmc wrote: post #50

Suggestion: Include a "Under EU Data Protection law: all/some/none" category. Companies in the EU, are required to do various things under EU data protection law. E.g. they are legally required to protect your personal data, they can only use the personal data for things you agreed to, they must tell you what data they keep on you if you ask, if they are wrong and you tell them, they are legally required to update th…

Yes. Differences between legislations is one thing that's making the task harder. I think it's better to focus to what the terms actually state. But I always keep in mind the jurisdiction under which the company operates as it can influence the meaning of the terms.

However I'd fear to get to the other extreme and to end up making a rating system saying which legislation is better than the other. It's not the scope.

One other thing: we think the terms should be self-explanatory. I don't think services should expect their users to know the EU data protection law. So it would seem smart for me that the services makes a statement about them in their terms (just like they state details about their security practices for instance).

Re: ToS;DR — TL;DR for Terms of Service and Privacy Policy

#58

Post by ldng »

hugoroy wrote: post #31
brador wrote: post #27

I love the color coding, makes it easy to see at a glance. What's the plan as terms of service change over time? Some greens might become redundant.

The plan is to work with the EFF's tosback https://github.com/pde/tosback2 (they need contributors too BTW) and track changes over time so we can notify people when something wrong is going on (they'd be able to subscribe to a list of services' ToS;DR)

They should use V8 to fetch TOS so that Facebook don't get away with its latest TOS change.

http://www.tosback.org/diff.php?vid=1740

Yes, it's in Javascript so not crawlable by TOSBack. The TOS is obfuscated to ... protect its privacy ? So ironic coming from those who claim privacy is dead.

Re: ToS;DR — TL;DR for Terms of Service and Privacy Policy

#59

Post by archgoon »

rmc wrote: post #51
aresant wrote: post #18

Great concept and smart execution. A suggestion - rather than rating "A" through "E" why not change to the more recognizable (for US audience at least) scale of "A through F" (A/B/C/D/F) which we're all mercilessly trained to recognize through years of school grades? "E" as your worst rating confused me at first glance - could be interpreted as "Excellent"

Wait the US doesn't have an 'E'? (Is 'F' short for Fail? I thought it was just the continuation of the sequence). Regardless, at least A is best, B is worse than that, etc. which makes sense.

> Wait the US doesn't have an 'E'? (Is 'F' short for Fail? I thought it was just the continuation of the sequence)

Well, apparently it's more complicated than that. I always assumed that the lack of E was so that there would be no confusion with the ESNU system (which a number of students used to have in elementary school, but then they switch over to the A-F system in middle school). Also, many countries outside the U.S., including non-english speaking ones, use the A-F system. Still researching the origin.

I had previously believed that the A-F system was universal across the US college system, though apparently University of Arizona has the 'E' grade.

Re: ToS;DR — TL;DR for Terms of Service and Privacy Policy

#60

Post by a3_nm »

chrismonsanto wrote: post #54

Given how open source projects are increasingly using GitHub as the canonical repository, I'm a bit disappointed that they can refuse you service for any reason at all. I want to believe that the GH guys are good people and were just lazy here. So, +1 for tos-dr for letting me know, and a potential extra +1 if they help us get GH to change this policy. I'm going to let them know this matters to me, I hope others here…

> I'm a bit disappointed that they can refuse you service for any reason at all.

This is actually a problem with the methodology (I think): most probably, none of the service providers pledge to provide service to you, so they can all refuse service for any reason. Github should probably get credit because at least they are honest about it.

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