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Terms and conditions word by word

forbrukerradet.no

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Re: Terms and conditions word by word

#11

Post by yxlx »

egjerlow wrote: post #7
INTPenis wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Came here to say that tosdr is much simpler because that video stream is like listening to a text2speech version of a large and complex legal text. Combined with a crackly norwegian accent that's even hard for me as a swede to accept.

The way it is titled on the Norwegian version of the page ("We read app terms and conditions minute by minute") they're probably partly spoofing the successful NRK 'slow TV shows'[1] that were all titled thus. Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z7VYVjR_nwE [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow_television#Norwegian_Broa...

This is correct, as can be seen from the following tweet retweeted by Forbrukerrådet and therefore currently on display on the OP link: https://mobile.twitter.com/PRlinjen/status/73507293647489024...

Re: Terms and conditions word by word

#13

Post by switch007 »

chirau wrote: post #6

I'd really love to see an app which monitors changes in terms and conditions for different apps and services so that I am notified whenever something changes.

https://www.docracy.com/tos/changes

There's an RSS feed for all changes, haven't looked to see if there's per-site feeds.

Re: Terms and conditions word by word

#14

Post by belorn »

barkbro wrote: post #5

>1. Cut back on the obvious Would this work when there are different laws for different jurisdictions and there is no way to tell for sure where the user acutally is located? I thought the reason behind the obviousness was to cover everything. >2. Write so that people understand >3. Keep it short and concise That probably wouldn't be beneficial for all the companies using the user-as-the-product model. "Terms of Serv…

The problem with trying to cover everything, is that it has eroded the definition of informed consent. Expecting a person to do a informed decision on everything is difficult for even a certified expert on law, and much of "everything" is only relevant in context of local law and local contract law which dictate what is and isn't acceptable in a contract.

We are thus in a rather odd situation where most contracts and agreements are signed without the signer having a clue what they agree to.

Re: Terms and conditions word by word

#16

Post by bballer »

chirau wrote: post #6

I'd really love to see an app which monitors changes in terms and conditions for different apps and services so that I am notified whenever something changes.

Wouldn't it be pretty easy to create a git repo that you seed with the a bunch of ToS, have a cron fetch them everyday or so, run `git diff` to see if there are changes, push them, tag a new release and boom anyone subscribed will be notified.

Re: Terms and conditions word by word

#17

Post by rlpb »

belorn wrote: post #14
barkbro wrote: post #5

>1. Cut back on the obvious Would this work when there are different laws for different jurisdictions and there is no way to tell for sure where the user acutally is located? I thought the reason behind the obviousness was to cover everything. >2. Write so that people understand >3. Keep it short and concise That probably wouldn't be beneficial for all the companies using the user-as-the-product model. "Terms of Serv…

The problem with trying to cover everything, is that it has eroded the definition of informed consent . Expecting a person to do a informed decision on everything is difficult for even a certified expert on law, and much of "everything" is only relevant in context of local law and local contract law which dictate what is and isn't acceptable in a contract. We are thus in a rather odd situation where most contracts an…

Various jurisdictions have consumer protection laws that try to help here. What I think would help is if, for consumer contracts:

1. The weight of individual terms diminished in law as the contract length increases. A reasonable length would be judged by the nature of the contract (a reasonable length for the simple sale of goods would be short, a complex arrangement like a mortgage would be expected to be longer).

2. If for a particular term in favour of party A, party A cannot reasonably believe that party B read and understood it at the time of forming the contract, then the term is void. For example, if a contract is presented to me as a consumer, I clearly have never seen it before and sign it immediately without reading it, the signature should mean nothing and the only contract that exists should be an implied contract around what we are doing.

Re: Terms and conditions word by word

#19

Post by danso »

Given that there's often a lot of boilerplate for TOS, would it be fairly easy to come up with a few heuristics for a tool that when fed the text of a TOS, could deemphasize the boilerplate and perhaps flag known problematic (or, at least, esoteric) language? Not a sophisticated AI thing, mind you, just something that cuts a little more to the chase.

edit: I mean that the tool should be a dumb high-pass filter that would work in addition to what tosdr provides through user reviews and manual classification via its plugin: https://tosdr.org/classification.html

Re: Terms and conditions word by word

#20

Post by philippnagel »

bballer wrote: post #16
chirau wrote: post #6

I'd really love to see an app which monitors changes in terms and conditions for different apps and services so that I am notified whenever something changes.

Wouldn't it be pretty easy to create a git repo that you seed with the a bunch of ToS, have a cron fetch them everyday or so, run `git diff` to see if there are changes, push them, tag a new release and boom anyone subscribed will be notified.

Sounds good. Another way could be to feed the ToS URL into a visual web scraper (e.g https://github.com/scrapinghub/portia, scrape, then compare and notify via email.
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