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Terms of Service; Didn’t Read

tosdr.org

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Re: Terms of Service; Didn’t Read

#51

Post by josefx »

forgingahead wrote: post #13

It's all farcical, but it's pervasive because of the lawyers I guess. Even a supposedly design-first-consumer-friendly company like Apple has walls of tiny text to scroll through. If only Terms of Services could be upgraded to: 1. A simple, plain English/local language explanation in bullet points of what the software will be doing. Like how you would explain it to your parents. 2. A link to the legalese, so that cov…

> Even a supposedly design-first-consumer-friendly company like Apple

The company that actively misled consumers about the EU wide minimum two year warranty, sold it separately as extended warranty and finally placed the court mandated correction on its home page just a bit out of sight.

If so called "consumer friendly" companies had to write a honest guide to social interactions it would start of with a chapter on the benefits of rape and pillaging.

Re: Terms of Service; Didn’t Read

#52

Post by rusk »

alsetmusic wrote: post #45
gorgoiler wrote: post #6

If a website knows I didn't really read a contract, can they claim I am bound by it? I like to hope that the time-spent-reading is logged somewhere. Should it come up in court, Website.com would be required to disclose their logs which would show that I spent all of 1.35s reading their terms and conditions, most of which was spent scrolling. Another puerile hack of mine is to sign a document with the name "I do not a…

I don’t think time spent would matter if someone took the deliberate action of clicking “Accept.” It’s like arguing that you didn’t read a contract before you signed. You still signed. I’m not arguing in favor of TOS. I just don’t buy this. The “I do not agree,” method reminds me of the tactics of “sovereign citizens.” They try to game things via highly specific language. People think they can loophole the system, bu…

> You still signed

Prove it was me that signed. Prove it was me that clicked accept.

Re: Terms of Service; Didn’t Read

#53

Post by Wowfunhappy »

alsetmusic wrote: post #45
gorgoiler wrote: post #6

If a website knows I didn't really read a contract, can they claim I am bound by it? I like to hope that the time-spent-reading is logged somewhere. Should it come up in court, Website.com would be required to disclose their logs which would show that I spent all of 1.35s reading their terms and conditions, most of which was spent scrolling. Another puerile hack of mine is to sign a document with the name "I do not a…

I don’t think time spent would matter if someone took the deliberate action of clicking “Accept.” It’s like arguing that you didn’t read a contract before you signed. You still signed. I’m not arguing in favor of TOS. I just don’t buy this. The “I do not agree,” method reminds me of the tactics of “sovereign citizens.” They try to game things via highly specific language. People think they can loophole the system, bu…

My take is that if one party to a contract does not have a reasonable expectation that the contract was read by the other party, the contract should be invalid.

People need to know what they’re signing. Imagine if a celebrity was signing a bunch of autographs for fans, and someone surreptitiously stuck a contract under their hand. We can agree that wouldn’t be valid, right?

Re: Terms of Service; Didn’t Read

#54

Post by nemo44x »

alexfromapex wrote: post #44
II2II wrote: post #18

On the first day of a university course, several hundred students asked to line up and sign a two page agreement in order to access computing resources necessary for the course. When my turn came, I asked where I could read it without holding up the entire line. They were shocked that anyone would ask such a question, though they provided me a space to read over the document. If blindly signing a contract one of the…

I had a quiz in middle school where the end of the directions said to ignore everything and put down your pencil. Really wish all schools taught this.

It’s good training for test taking in general. Read every question before starting. Then solve the ones you find easy first.

Many people are “bad at tests” because they get stuck on something, panic, waste all their time and then blow the test.

Re: Terms of Service; Didn’t Read

#55

Post by rusk »

avel wrote: post #28
stunt wrote: post #10

I think we need some universal standards for ToS. The same way we have some visual rating signs for movies and video games. Most of it should be regular and easy to categories. And there should be a separate rating for how many irregular terms are in there.

We tried that for Privacy Policies with P3P ( https://www.w3.org/P3P/ ) and we failed.

Did it fail on its own or was it helped that way? I can’t imagine any of the big players that drive a lot of the standardisation would be too keen on this ...

Re: Terms of Service; Didn’t Read

#56

Post by clairity »

alsetmusic wrote: post #45
gorgoiler wrote: post #6

If a website knows I didn't really read a contract, can they claim I am bound by it? I like to hope that the time-spent-reading is logged somewhere. Should it come up in court, Website.com would be required to disclose their logs which would show that I spent all of 1.35s reading their terms and conditions, most of which was spent scrolling. Another puerile hack of mine is to sign a document with the name "I do not a…

I don’t think time spent would matter if someone took the deliberate action of clicking “Accept.” It’s like arguing that you didn’t read a contract before you signed. You still signed. I’m not arguing in favor of TOS. I just don’t buy this. The “I do not agree,” method reminds me of the tactics of “sovereign citizens.” They try to game things via highly specific language. People think they can loophole the system, bu…

time spent doesn't work because it's only loosely correlated to the actual behavior they're trying to track, which is to read the tos. reading is not even perfectly correlated with understanding the tos, which is what we're really after.

this type of mistaken logic (loose correlations taken as tight ones) is everywhere. it's so common to look for secondary characteristics that can stand in for the desired one. and that's often how we get unintended consequences.

Re: Terms of Service; Didn’t Read

#57

Post by scotty79 »

alsetmusic wrote: post #45
gorgoiler wrote: post #6

If a website knows I didn't really read a contract, can they claim I am bound by it? I like to hope that the time-spent-reading is logged somewhere. Should it come up in court, Website.com would be required to disclose their logs which would show that I spent all of 1.35s reading their terms and conditions, most of which was spent scrolling. Another puerile hack of mine is to sign a document with the name "I do not a…

I don’t think time spent would matter if someone took the deliberate action of clicking “Accept.” It’s like arguing that you didn’t read a contract before you signed. You still signed. I’m not arguing in favor of TOS. I just don’t buy this. The “I do not agree,” method reminds me of the tactics of “sovereign citizens.” They try to game things via highly specific language. People think they can loophole the system, bu…

I often don't even read what's written on the button? Am I lefally accepting something even if I'm just cliking buttons randomly to make anything useful happen in your app?

Re: Terms of Service; Didn’t Read

#58

Post by rusk »

dsukhin wrote: post #43
avel wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We tried that for Privacy Policies with P3P ( https://www.w3.org/P3P/ ) and we failed.

This is fascinating, I didn't realize there was a spec for this for the web. But this begs the question: Apple Privacy Labels "caught on" because Apple has unilateral control to enforce them in the App Store. If ostensibly the same idea for the WWW did not catch on, is the problem (1) the lack of enforcement/economic incentive mechanisms on the decentralized web or (2) that consumers really didn't care/know enough to…

I would say both, and a bit more besides. I would say that the big players are actively disincentivized from supporting something like this.

Re: Terms of Service; Didn’t Read

#59

Post by 13415 »

gorgoiler wrote: post #6

If a website knows I didn't really read a contract, can they claim I am bound by it? I like to hope that the time-spent-reading is logged somewhere. Should it come up in court, Website.com would be required to disclose their logs which would show that I spent all of 1.35s reading their terms and conditions, most of which was spent scrolling. Another puerile hack of mine is to sign a document with the name "I do not a…

The best thing to do is to send them by snail mail a printed copy of their ToS with the changes highlighted that you'd like to suggest, accompanied by a friendly letter stating that they are free to send you back their suggestions for further negotiation and that no further action on their behalf is needed if they accept the suggested changes.

Re: Terms of Service; Didn’t Read

#60

Post by wolco5 »

vntok wrote: post #47
gorgoiler wrote: post #6

If a website knows I didn't really read a contract, can they claim I am bound by it? I like to hope that the time-spent-reading is logged somewhere. Should it come up in court, Website.com would be required to disclose their logs which would show that I spent all of 1.35s reading their terms and conditions, most of which was spent scrolling. Another puerile hack of mine is to sign a document with the name "I do not a…

For those reading, be aware that while signing "I do not agree" is borderline fraudulent, at least it's not clear user impersonation ie identity theft. There are people who do similar things but sign "Daffy Duck" or even "Barack Obama". Someday they'll be in for a surprise visit.

Not true at all. No one is coming for a visit ever.

You could be known as Daffy Duck or Obama or call yourself that. There is no legal requirement to use a legal name.

What sites do if a legal name is required is to require a credit card and get the info from there.

Clicking,I do not agree is not borderline fraud. Turning off javascript and not getting a tos prompt is not fraud either.

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