Terms of Service; Didn’t Read

Yes, like we do with Creative Commons or FLOSS licenses, so you don't have any reason to read them more than once or occasionally. Whether somebody. Maybe something like the uniform commercial code, in the USA. That would be a nice contribution by some organization.

Even if only some sections are standardized and others not, that would be a comparative win. Maybe an "exceptions/additions" part.

Edit: also, there are some few sites I recall that summarized terms and/or pointed out problematic parts, to help someone who cared but didn't want to read them all. I might be able to hunt up (a) link(s) if desired.

What I do currently is read them once, mentally note the date displayed, save them, and when they change, use a short script to make it easy to see differences (uses fmt to make lines to shorter first, and get sometimes fewer differences that way). Sometimes I have pushed back and contacted the organization, or just not used them. I wrote a bunch of complaints about this kind of thing, at my site -- it takes us further down the slippery slope of saying things we don't mean to each other, habitually, which is sadly dishonest IMO.

When I went into sing my Mortgage Loan, the officer pointed at the X's and said "sign here, here, and initial here, here, and here"

I then turned to page one and started reading.

The conversation that ensued, where they tried to get me to sign without "wasting their time" was amazing. I get I'm unusual for wanted to read what I'm signing, but I can't have been the only one. I do suspect I was one of the rare ones that they couldn't bully into signing quickly.

Serious contracts are witnessed or, better, notarised. These witnesses attest to the good faith involved in the signing ceremony.

Accept button clicking is not witnessed. Any contract so-signed should be good for all of $10 worth of dispute. No more.

Thank you. This was fascinating.

Re: I do not agree: the only way my sophomoric hack might ever actually work would be if I argued that clearly the website’s didn’t bother reading my contract response — if they had they would have correctly interpreted my actions as meaning I didn’t agree to the terms.

But then I went ahead and used the site anyway. Someone who didn’t agree to the terms would never do such a thing. It is a very silly idea of mine.

Educational settings are one of the worst places where insidious terms crop up. You often simply don't have a choice.

I'm a volunteer firefighter and was registered by my department to take a course with a government-run institution to upgrade my certification.

A while back that institution began using Blackboard - a Netherlands company - for all learning materials, whose ToS [1] includes a clause where I must agree to defend and indemnify Blackboard from and against any and all claims, damages, obligations, losses, liabilities, costs or debt, and expenses (including but not limited to attorney's fees) arising from my use of and access to their product, as well as any other party's access and use of the product with my username or password (which I contemplate could occur if Blackboard or the institution were to suffer a data breach).

To read the textbook (only available online) there was a similar ToS from yet another third party. You can't access any of the material without explicitly agreeing to both contracts.

I was uncomfortable with the clause. For one, I didn't understand why my interaction with my local government institution required me to indemnify two foreign companies with whom I have zero relation (and didn't want any). Before "cloud services", the institution would have contracted with the vendors themselves to buy the platform, then presented their own contract to me (which is the right way to do this, and which I'd be fine with).

I deferred accepting, and reached out to the institution to find out if there was some alternative way to obtain the materials (e.g. in hardcopy). I spent months trying to find alternative arrangements, but the bottom line was nobody cared.

I showed it to a commercial lawyer in the department who agreed the clause is nonsensical and he expressed some choice words for the institution foisting this upon its students.

I give of my own time and volition do firefighting and rescue (and love doing so!). Nobody was paying me to take this course.

In the end I wound up hitting the Accept button, with a deep feeling of having effectively been bullied into it.

Compared to some of the other ToS's I've seen out there this one was comparatively mild. I can only imagine how parents must feel when such garbage finds its way into their kids' learning environments.

[1] https://help.blackboard.com/Terms_of_Use and https://tosdr.org/en/service/2230