Terms and conditions word by word(forbrukerradet.no) |
Terms and conditions word by word(forbrukerradet.no) |
edit: I mean that the tool should be a dumb high-pass filter that would work in addition to what tosdr provides through user reviews and manual classification via its plugin: https://tosdr.org/classification.html
It was an interesting thought experiment, so I expanded it to my large body of private contracts that I've collected after many years of law practice. The results were less accurate (because ToS tend to follow a pretty rigid pattern, mostly), but still pretty good.
The big question is: does anyone really care about it? For example, I never look at tosdr.org because what are you going to do? negotiate a ToS? It's not as if there's any meaningful freedom of choice in this space. My personal view (not legal advice!) is that most browse-wrap ToS aren't enforceable as contracts.
At some point I gave in and decided a better approach would be to just point out that no sane consumer can read all that.
Possibly avoid the service or at least limit what data I share with them.
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.
It's fairly common to see clauses that state the terms may change at any time without notice, and continued use of the service means you agree to any changes made. That seems completely unenforceable to me, but I am not a lawyer.
I've often fantasized about a legal framework similar to Creative Commons, but for TOS, that would protect the interests of both users and service providers.
"No Right to leave the service" - Delicious
"The Android app can record sound & video from your phone, at any time, without your consent" - Facebook
The sweetest of them all seems to be DDG
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow_television#Norwegian_Broa...
Would this work when there are different laws for different jurisdictions and there is no way to tell for sure where the user acutally is located? I thought the reason behind the obviousness was to cover everything.
>2. Write so that people understand
>3. Keep it short and concise
That probably wouldn't be beneficial for all the companies using the user-as-the-product model. "Terms of Service: We retain the right to track your location, read your text messages, listen to the microphone and read your thoughts"
We are thus in a rather odd situation where most contracts and agreements are signed without the signer having a clue what they agree to.
1. The weight of individual terms diminished in law as the contract length increases. A reasonable length would be judged by the nature of the contract (a reasonable length for the simple sale of goods would be short, a complex arrangement like a mortgage would be expected to be longer).
2. If for a particular term in favour of party A, party A cannot reasonably believe that party B read and understood it at the time of forming the contract, then the term is void. For example, if a contract is presented to me as a consumer, I clearly have never seen it before and sign it immediately without reading it, the signature should mean nothing and the only contract that exists should be an implied contract around what we are doing.
This is an obvious difficulty, though it could perhaps be alleviated somewhat by #5 (Adopt an industry standard) - some kind of "base" set of T&Cs and standardised vocabulary for each jurisdiction.
There seems to be a related browser extension (which is recommended elsewhere in this thread by egjerlow), https://tosdr.org, but I'm not quite sure if it will tell you when something has changed.
There's an RSS feed for all changes, haven't looked to see if there's per-site feeds.
Oh so meta.
Idea was to just keep it as light as possible while off loading all the heavy lifting.
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.
Of course that means the exact enforceable contents of every ToS ultimately boil down to case law but for customers this is a much better solution than "you may have accidentally sold your soul".