Terms and conditions word by word • Hacker News Board

Re: Terms and conditions word by word

#41

Post by gfo » Tue, May 24, 2016, 7:45 PM UTC

danso wrote: post #19

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 w…

Slightly related, but there's a plugin for Chrome that sort of does this: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/terms-of-service-d...

It doesn't read the ToS for a site. Rather, it pulls from its own database that describes potential issues with a site's ToS and alerts you of them when visiting. YouTube always gets flagged for me.

Re: Terms and conditions word by word

#42

Post by xufi » Tue, May 24, 2016, 8:01 PM UTC

TorKlingberg wrote: post #24

It's ridiculous that I have to constantly lie and say that I have read and agreed to long legal texts unless I want to go live in cave.

Thats ok about 99 percent of us do that as well. Youre not alone freind.

Re: Terms and conditions word by word

#43

Post by danso » Tue, May 24, 2016, 10:18 PM UTC

nihonde wrote: post #26

danso wrote: post #19

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 w…

I'm a lawyer, and not an expert in AI. I once gathered a ton of Terms of Service, cleaned them up as text files, and began training a classifier. By the time I was done, it was pretty good at telling me which section heading in the typical ToS table of contents any random text belonged to. It was an interesting thought experiment, so I expanded it to my large body of private contracts that I've collected after many y…

Off topic, but you must have a lot of cool potential projects in your domain to apply programming.

Re: Terms and conditions word by word

#44

Post by nihonde » Wed, May 25, 2016, 2:58 AM UTC

danso wrote: post #43

nihonde wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a lawyer, and not an expert in AI. I once gathered a ton of Terms of Service, cleaned them up as text files, and began training a classifier. By the time I was done, it was pretty good at telling me which section heading in the typical ToS table of contents any random text belonged to. It was an interesting thought experiment, so I expanded it to my large body of private contracts that I've collected after many y…

Off topic, but you must have a lot of cool potential projects in your domain to apply programming.

I have a lot of "mad science" projects, but only to help me make my work easier. I would never try to turn any of my work into products for sale. Selling tech to lawyers and law firms is a good way to make yourself completely miserable. (They are nearly always nightmare customers.)

Lawyers and law firms currently have no serious imperative to work efficiently. Until companies let go of their reliance on big law firms, this will continue. I hear a lot of talk about people wanting lawyers to change, but then if you talk to any funded started, they nearly always either waste a ton of money on expensive law firms, or they avoid lawyers altogether. It's a complicated problem that perhaps only time can change.