Maybe of interest:
https://www.sec.gov/pdf/handbook.pdf
Lawyers who prepare submissions to the SEC in the US have long been advised to use "plain English".
The ‘Terms and Conditions’ Reckoning Is Coming
171–180 of 255 posts
Re: The ‘Terms and Conditions’ Reckoning Is Coming
#172Just like an underage person or drunk is unable to give consent, it should be illegal to coerce an average Joe untrained in the law to agree to a 50-page document filled with legalese, unless you pay for them to be advised by a lawyer.
When exactly did it enter the public consciousness that drunk people are unable to give consent? I feel if this is true, there are many drunken hookups that become questionable. I'm in my mid-30s, and I feel this concept wasn't really a thing in my clubbing days.
You've never heard "alcohol is the most common date rape drug?"
Re: The ‘Terms and Conditions’ Reckoning Is Coming
#173Disclaimer: I hate complex / abusive T&C's, and I'm keen to see them abolished. But... It seems to me like we as a public are blaming corporations for our failures. As adults we're responsible for what contracts we enter into, except in cases of coercion. 99% of us were stupid enough to state that we accepted terms that we didn't even read. Especially in cases where the product/service was purely optional (Netflix, C…
I think this is using an overly simplistic blame/responsibility model and if we don't want to have more problems on our hands, we really need to change it. > 99% of us were stupid enough to state that we accepted terms that we didn't even read. Well, here's the thing, if 99% of people do something, what's going on here? That's an extremely high rate. Surely if this was a normal choice, there would be a large dissent…
Thank you.
Is this a fallacy with a established name?
("nobody is doing it right but it's obviously must be their fault")
People do this with programming languages as well.
"haha everyone's making stupid mistakes using this language .. it can't be the language so we should blame the people"
Re: The ‘Terms and Conditions’ Reckoning Is Coming
#174> Waving a 2-inch-thick printed version of the social network’s user agreement, Senator Lindsey Graham quoted a line from the first page, then intoned: “I’m a lawyer, and I have no idea what that means.” Anyone have a link to that document? Looking for the terms I'm supposed to agree to if I want to use Facebook as an ordinary user, I find this page, which purports to link to everything [1]. Looking at the "Statement…
Perhaps a more pertinent question is whether or not Lindsey Graham understands and expects every American citizen and resident to have read all 51 titles of the US Code and all of the Code of Federal Regulations which carry the force of statutory law by inclusion.
Re: The ‘Terms and Conditions’ Reckoning Is Coming
#175Yes. 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 contr…
> If a scientist offers subjects $10 for participating, the scientist must pay that $10 to anyone who declines the consent form.
Any resources I can learn more about this? An acquaintance of mine runs a research group at a university, designing and executing survey instruments for other groups. Periodically asks me to help her with leveraging Facebook Ads for participant recruitment when her traditional targeting means falls short (generally surveys that need participants less than ~35, but sometimes for other unique targeting requirements).
The ads usually advertise a gift card for qualifying and participating, and the only branch of the survey that includes the gift card portion is the one where participants both complete the survey and don't get routed out by the initial qualifier questions. The recruitment ad copy, the survey instruments, etc all have to go through IRB approval, so I assumed that process was all above board.
Re: The ‘Terms and Conditions’ Reckoning Is Coming
#176Yes. 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 contr…
How many of the 51 titles of the United States Code am I, as a citizen, expected to have read and understood? Isn't Mr. Graham being a little hypocritical?
Re: The ‘Terms and Conditions’ Reckoning Is Coming
#177Why cannot we, as consumers, gang up and define a kind of universal and fair ‘reverse contract’ that defines rights and duties that a potential service provider needs to conform to? If they don’t, we just don’t use their service.
Re: The ‘Terms and Conditions’ Reckoning Is Coming
#178>Martin Garner, an analyst at technology consultancy CCS Insight, suggests companies walk readers through their policies step by step. That way they could opt out of selected provisions—limiting, for instance, third parties that can gain access to the data or restricting the kinds of information companies may stockpile. Merging t&c with settings... I like this idea a lot. Privacy controls with the agreement right the…
> That way they could opt out of selected provisions—limiting, for instance, third parties that can gain access to the data or restricting the kinds of information companies may stockpile. Am I understanding this incorrectly or are you suggesting that we allow people to selectively opt-out of portions of a T&C document? Because good luck getting any legal department to buy into that whatsoever.
Of course company legal departments won't do that on their own initiative, however, they will help arrange that in a sane manner if the legislature forces them to do so.
The GDPR requirement is that companies will have to allow people to selectively opt-in to the portions of currently typical T&C documents which currently say that the user allows you to use their data for various purposes, or these portions will automatically be considered null and void.
This is already now implemented in a bunch of places - e.g. I got a mobile internet contract recently which involved being asked a bunch of questions about what private data uses I'd be okay with or not, and that resulted in customized/removed/added paragraphs in the agreement that I signed; but the other companies have still about a month until GDPR requires everyone here to do so or stop using people's data.
Re: The ‘Terms and Conditions’ Reckoning Is Coming
#179True 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…
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…
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Re: The ‘Terms and Conditions’ Reckoning Is Coming
#180I think the legalize issue is a bit exaggerated. Yes, many (too many) sites and companies have a lot of legalize in their terms...but there are also many that do not. Nevertheless, as far as I've seen people aren't any more likely to read the latter, or any more likely to understand them if they do read them.
I think there are two main factors that make people not read these things.
First, as Joel Spolsky noted in his writings on UI design, "In fact, users can’t read anything, and if they could, they wouldn’t want to" [1]. He does not mean, of course, that users literally cannot read. They just act like, at least when you are trying to get them to read something that they didn't actually ask to read.
Second, terms and conditions tend to be long, and because they want to be precise tend toward more complicated language and structure. That's going to lose a lot of people.
[1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/26/designing-for-peop...