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The ‘Terms and Conditions’ Reckoning Is Coming

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Re: The ‘Terms and Conditions’ Reckoning Is Coming

#201

Post by fricat1ve »

mhneu wrote: post #160

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 contr…

Even consent itself is something that's overly fetishized in our society. It's a sign that a group's common understanding of people's basic rights and responsibilities has fallen apart. So everything comes down to some idealized notion of "consent" which, in a well-functioning society, is necessary but not sufficient to determine whether an action is acceptable or not.

Re: The ‘Terms and Conditions’ Reckoning Is Coming

#202

Post by throwawayjava »

x0x0 wrote: post #147
Digit-Al wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I beg to differ. > 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.” 1) Two inch thick I've read some pretty long books in my time but that takes the cake. Most people these days don't even have enough attention span to read a complete internet article. How do you exp…

You can simultaneously believe that * FB is doing their absolute best to make sure no "user" understands what they have agreed to * writing the law in "plain english" is the stupidest thing I've ever heard of in my life. See the multi million dollar lawsuit this year about whether a missing Oxford comma changed wage rules for a class of truck drivers. Any attempt to write law in plain english introduces giant ambigui…

> FB is doing their absolute best to make sure no "user" understands what they have agreed to*

But before making this argument, one should go read FB's ToS and data policy. Here they are:

https://www.facebook.com/terms.php

https://www.facebook.com/policy.php

Re: The ‘Terms and Conditions’ Reckoning Is Coming

#203

Post by losteric »

freehunter wrote: post #168
losteric wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Certainly there are improvements but you will never fit it all into one short book that a layperson could read. However, the law could still certainly be shortened and simplified. The GDPR is written in plain English.

Yet GDPR is so vague that most companies I talk to about it have each taken very different things from it. "Except as required for security purposes" is a big exception.

Traditional legalese has plenty of ambiguities, they're just hidden behind obscure language.

Re: The ‘Terms and Conditions’ Reckoning Is Coming

#204

Post by Retra »

dhimes wrote: post #139
hiccuphippo wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always found the language in RFCs better than legalese. Just the fact that they specify up front what the words must, shall, required, etc mean makes it less ambiguous. I feel lawyers use the ambiguity of language to bend the law in the way they need at the moment.

Exactly. If the precision of the language of law was working we wouldn't need to fight over it in court. Our new tax code hadn't been read by anyone who passed it- and, as an accountant explained to me long ago- we won't know exactly what it means until we get to court. Even if a reset is unsustainably simple, it's time for one.

Even if the law worked mechanically, we still need to argue it in court, since the law cannot encode the complexity of the real world anyway. It is perfectly reasonable for someone to break laws, so long as they have sufficient justification for doing so.

For instance, you won't be guilty of violating a law if you are coerced to do so, and the court still needs to evaluate what level of coercion you underwent, and that fundamentally requires human empathy.

The law is not meant to be employed mechanically. It's there to make society more efficient when handling the easy cases.

Re: The ‘Terms and Conditions’ Reckoning Is Coming

#205

Post by rabboRubble »

downandout wrote: post #46
rabboRubble wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

250 hours: that is the number of hours required to actually read all the adhesion contracts the typical American is exposed to in a year. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/mar/03/terms-of-... 250 hours is a full man-month of time. Do you have a free month in your calendar to read contracts and do very little else? Nobody I know has that sort of free time. So calling people or their behaviors "failures" for…

Access to Facebook, Spotify, or Netflix is not a human right. These are private services offered by private companies who are free to offer those services on any terms they choose. It’s fine and completely understandable that you may not have time or cannot understand the agreements under which they may choose to offer you access. Your remedy for that is to not use the services in question. Your remedy isn’t to lie t…

Adhesion contracts are not limited to social media and entertainment sites, and I suspect you are picking those sites to belittle based on the frivolity those sites' categories.

Adhesion contracts appear in banking, medical, and insurance contracts and yes, when you sign up for Facebook or Netflix. Yes, you can choose different services. Please identify a banking, credit card, brokerage, doctor, and insurer that does not have lengthy contracts.

Re: The ‘Terms and Conditions’ Reckoning Is Coming

#206

Post by s73v3r_ »

WhyNotHugo wrote: post #157
jkaplowitz wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But that renewal provides a hook for legislators to attach all kinds of distasteful things to it.

Re: The ‘Terms and Conditions’ Reckoning Is Coming

#207

Post by hiccuphippo »

throwawayjava wrote: post #123
mieseratte wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do you think allowing programs to be specified in plain English is a good idea? The difference is that one is expected to consent and be beholden to something they could not reasonably understand without paying a large amount of money to a specialist. That I write my code in brainfuck is of no consequence to someone, unless that brainfuck is potentially going to incarcerate them.

> The difference is that one is expected to consent and be beholden to something they could not reasonably understand without paying a large amount of money to a specialist. I've found that this is generally less true than I imagine it to be. A lot of law is not actually so difficult to understand. Legalese is still English, and Google is great for figuring out the odd meanings of certain terms of art. Most of the ex…

I wonder if it would be possible to create an AI that, given a legalese text, could output comments for each fragment explaining and showing examples of what it means. Now that I think about it, wasn't genius.com doing something like that but using crowdsourcing instead?

Re: The ‘Terms and Conditions’ Reckoning Is Coming

#208

Post by x0x0 »

throwawayjava wrote: post #202
x0x0 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can simultaneously believe that * FB is doing their absolute best to make sure no "user" understands what they have agreed to * writing the law in "plain english" is the stupidest thing I've ever heard of in my life. See the multi million dollar lawsuit this year about whether a missing Oxford comma changed wage rules for a class of truck drivers. Any attempt to write law in plain english introduces giant ambigui…

> FB is doing their absolute best to make sure no "user" understands what they have agreed to* But before making this argument, one should go read FB's ToS and data policy. Here they are: https://www.facebook.com/terms.php https://www.facebook.com/policy.php

Where, precisely, is the bit where they steal data from my phone about sms and phone calls?

Re: The ‘Terms and Conditions’ Reckoning Is Coming

#209

Post by x0x0 »

dhimes wrote: post #163
x0x0 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can simultaneously believe that * FB is doing their absolute best to make sure no "user" understands what they have agreed to * writing the law in "plain english" is the stupidest thing I've ever heard of in my life. See the multi million dollar lawsuit this year about whether a missing Oxford comma changed wage rules for a class of truck drivers. Any attempt to write law in plain english introduces giant ambigui…

That law you cited was not written in "plain English." It was Maine's legal code. And it was ambiguous.

And plain english would have made that better?

Re: The ‘Terms and Conditions’ Reckoning Is Coming

#210

Post by hiccuphippo »

Retra wrote: post #204
dhimes wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. If the precision of the language of law was working we wouldn't need to fight over it in court. Our new tax code hadn't been read by anyone who passed it- and, as an accountant explained to me long ago- we won't know exactly what it means until we get to court. Even if a reset is unsustainably simple, it's time for one.

Even if the law worked mechanically, we still need to argue it in court, since the law cannot encode the complexity of the real world anyway. It is perfectly reasonable for someone to break laws, so long as they have sufficient justification for doing so. For instance, you won't be guilty of violating a law if you are coerced to do so, and the court still needs to evaluate what level of coercion you underwent, and th…

Courts would be the debuggers/testers. And their findings would need to be integrated into the legal code as they happen.
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