Terms of Service; Didn’t Read(tosdr.org) |
Terms of Service; Didn’t Read(tosdr.org) |
If blindly signing a contract one of the first things that computer science students encounter, I'm not surprised that they simply put up those ToS without the expectation that they will be read.
For example when buying a property in the UK, the soliciter will be the one parses the legal documents. It's crazy to think that normal people are expected to fully understand these, and it doesn't surpise me when they just blindly sign them. At the end of the day they want the thing and carry on with their lives - throwing caution to the wind.
I think (though am not an attorney, so not sure what a really honest, articulate, kind one would say) that if attorneys who wrote these long, difficult agreements applied honesty and the Golden Rule, they would start reading them themselves more often in general life, and they would word them so that their target audience would have an easy time understanding them, etc etc. But the executives have other things on their minds I suppose, and don't push for this (or care...?). (maybe this is one of my pet peeves--sometimes I wonder if it just makes life harder for honest people). But I still think being honest and kind is totally worth it in the long run. Wrote more elsewhere on that.
In my career, I’ve negotiated
- a severance package in my offer letter from a company that said, “we don’t offer severance packages as a matter of policy.”
- a sign on bonus from a company that said, “we don’t offer sign-on bonuses as a matter of policy.”
- a longer expiration period for startup options, as well as partial acceleration of vesting in the case of a significant liquidity event, from a company that said, “we can’t modify our standard equity agreement papers.”
- immediate full vesting of matched 401(k) contributions from a company that said, “our policy is that matched contributions only vest after 1 year.”
- ability to expense my own Linux workstation, which I could keep, in the offer letter, from a company that said employees are only allowed to be issued Mac laptops.
- explicit extra section in the offer letter stating that any IP created by me using only my personal equipment and personal time was my sole property and was explicitly not subject to any part of the employee handbook dealing with ownership of IP.
In all these cases, the conversation usually started out with me being gaslit about all this being impossible or my expectations being crazy. But after sticking to my requirements, eventually it normalized out into a sincere discussion.
I should add, all these examples came from very large companies except for the case of the options expiry and acceleration.
I also gave a hard “no” to many companies over the years that wouldn’t negotiate on topics like these, and I can say I don’t regret it one bit. There’s never been a case where I said no to a job offer over inflexibility on all these topics and then later regretted it.
Overall, I view blindly signing ToS as the foundation for the situation we see today: these agreements exist in cases where they probably should not or include terms that are increasingly detrimental to the recipient. There is a bit of a difference between outlining the rules for accessing a service and granting a service the right to sell your data or stripping away avenues for legal recourse.
I'm sure you could bring up legal action, but everyone knows that's cost prohibitive...
Many people are “bad at tests” because they get stuck on something, panic, waste all their time and then blow the test.
Perhaps this was the moment when I first started the path to being a programmer.
This apartment has smart home things (hub, A/C, smart lock) that's controlled through a mobile app. The lease says you're responsible for supplying the internet for the devices and calling the company when the app or devices are not working, but the apartment complex insists they take care of it (they really do, they didn't lie). But there were no solid answers on why this section was in the lease and it was completely false as I haven't had to support or provide internet for any of the devices.
This led to: "I don't want to support it, I'd rather remove them and just use a physical key" but they weren't able to remove them, nor remove the section from the lease.
I get it, they aren't lawyers, but it's weird when you read it and realize how different things are in the real world compared to some of the agreements we all sign (completely the opposite, in this case). If it came to it, I have no doubt I'd still be held to the terms of the lease though.
I then turned to page one and started reading.
The conversation that ensued, where they tried to get me to sign without "wasting their time" was amazing. I get I'm unusual for wanted to read what I'm signing, but I can't have been the only one. I do suspect I was one of the rare ones that they couldn't bully into signing quickly.
Too bad.
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 agree" and then press accept, and see if they agreed to let me use the service anyway.
– https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15031020 (2017)
– https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9678357 (2015)
– https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8394144 (2014)
The installer presents the end-user license agreement (EULA). Immediately following it, it presents a multiple-choice quiz that asks questions about core parts of the EULA, such as permissible use, cancellation, refunds, jurisdiction/arbitration.
The installer then contains all the files to be installed. They are encrypted with a key that is composed of a hash value of the correct answers to the above quiz.
In this way, you could tie together whether someone reads the EULA with the possibility of performing the installation at all. This, in turn, causes successful installation to act as implicit proof of having read the terms. The order of the values must be randomized to prevent transmission of correct answers by index number only.
You are at home, and want to go shopping.
Your door only lets you out if you correctly answer some questions about the most recent changes in the law of your state.
Are you not a lawyer? Well tough luck, order your groceries trough Amazon then..
With wide enough support, a couple of benefits would be nefarious and malicious components would get highlighted quickly, and it could serve as a feedback channel from consumers to suppliers on why an agreement was rejected.
Ultimately, the power dynamic needs to be recalibrated.
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 create/enforce such free market incentives?
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 covers the legal requirements?
If I recall correctly, Stripe is one company whereby the Terms of Service tries to explain things to you clearly. That's certainly a start, but this would be an interesting thing to improve on and solve. Maybe a GPT-2/GPT-3 application? Tell me simply what this block of text means?
My major concern is the normalization of lying: the craziness of "I have read and accept..." makes liars out of all of us.
So I applaud the tosdr effort, but I don't believe it is addressing the real problem.
It doesn't matter what the TOCs are if they are presented at a gun point: a lot of services don't have alternatives and as much as I wouldn't cry for losing access to Reddit or YouTube,for some that would be the case.
Building the next Facebook? Legally bind yourself that you'll always provide API access and this right cannot ever be taken away to the extent permitted by the law.
Maybe we need a standardization for centralized service TOS like MIT/GPL etc are for OSS. So people can decide more easily which centralized services to use.
The "checkout our twitter" thing is especially cool.
I'm a volunteer firefighter and was registered by my department to take a course with a government-run institution to upgrade my certification.
A while back that institution began using Blackboard - a Netherlands company - for all learning materials, whose ToS [1] includes a clause where I must agree to defend and indemnify Blackboard from and against any and all claims, damages, obligations, losses, liabilities, costs or debt, and expenses (including but not limited to attorney's fees) arising from my use of and access to their product, as well as any other party's access and use of the product with my username or password (which I contemplate could occur if Blackboard or the institution were to suffer a data breach).
To read the textbook (only available online) there was a similar ToS from yet another third party. You can't access any of the material without explicitly agreeing to both contracts.
I was uncomfortable with the clause. For one, I didn't understand why my interaction with my local government institution required me to indemnify two foreign companies with whom I have zero relation (and didn't want any). Before "cloud services", the institution would have contracted with the vendors themselves to buy the platform, then presented their own contract to me (which is the right way to do this, and which I'd be fine with).
I deferred accepting, and reached out to the institution to find out if there was some alternative way to obtain the materials (e.g. in hardcopy). I spent months trying to find alternative arrangements, but the bottom line was nobody cared.
I showed it to a commercial lawyer in the department who agreed the clause is nonsensical and he expressed some choice words for the institution foisting this upon its students.
I give of my own time and volition do firefighting and rescue (and love doing so!). Nobody was paying me to take this course.
In the end I wound up hitting the Accept button, with a deep feeling of having effectively been bullied into it.
Compared to some of the other ToS's I've seen out there this one was comparatively mild. I can only imagine how parents must feel when such garbage finds its way into their kids' learning environments.
[1] https://help.blackboard.com/Terms_of_Use and https://tosdr.org/en/service/2230
I pointed out that the contract had several places where it referred to other documents I must agree to, referenced by URL, and the linked-to documents didn't exist.
We use cookies to give you the best experience on our website. If you continue to use this site we will assume you are happy with it. [Ok] [No] [Privacy Policy]
Actual text from the www.gdpr.eu cookie consent pop-up. =)
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/11/reddit-users-are-the-least-v...
I wouldn't mind being tracked so much if... they could identify that I've agreed to being tracked on the 7 websites I visit 1000 times before.
Following one law and breaking another by not having a No button (only a link to duckduckgo.com under "get my out of here"). Not sure I trust someone to explain me Terms if they don't understand it themselves.
In reality only things which you would reasonably expect to be in a tos or privacy policy could be enforced, given 99% of users don’t read them, or understand them.
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, but still get snared. SCs still go to jail.
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?
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.
Prove it was me that signed. Prove it was me that clicked accept.
A contract requires consideration, and a meeting of the minds. If you can't even request a change to the terms for your agreement, it isn't a spiritually valid contract. It's the difference between actually being prepared to negotiate, and making an ultimatum. ToS's are often presented in the forms of ultimatum's with no alternatives. That I do not accept.
Terms of services ("Allgemeine Geschäftsbedingungen" (AGB)) are pre-formulated clauses that one party introduces into the contract without giving the other party the possibility to object to or at least negotiate these clauses.
The ToS are part of your legal contract with the other party, regardless of whether you read them. One example of ToS could also be the house rules in your local gym, which possibly weren't even handed out to you but instead they are up on a wall somewhere near the front desk. The important thing is that you need to have the _possibility_ to read them (if you are blind they will need to make sure there is a workaround). Depending on the circumstances the obligation to make sure that you are aware of the ToS can be more strict.
The important caveat to using terms of services as a company is a strict content control. § 307-309 of the german civil law define certain things that you cannot possibly put in your ToS. And if a company still does it, a Court will not try to interpret the rule in a favorable way for them, they will strike it out completely. (no "geltungserhaltende Reduktion")
Examples of content control include that when buying something it is impossible to sign away (some of) your rights as a consumer for a faulty product. But there are also some "catch-all" clauses in there that will check whether parts of the ToS placed an unfair burden on you as a consumer.
ToS can also be void if they are unclearly written.
Edit: Signing with "I do not agree" is an interesting approach and sometimes these "hacks" can actually work in Court. That being said, it would probably not hold up. Pressing on "accept" is not somehow invalid just because you said so somewhere else.
Off topic but an interesting example of a similar hack is this case of a man changing a pre formulated contract with his bank which they send to him first and then signed it when he had send it back to him. https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2013/08/14/man-who-outwitted-...
Re: I do not agree: the only way my sophomoric hack might ever actually work would be if I argued that clearly the website’s didn’t bother reading my contract response — if they had they would have correctly interpreted my actions as meaning I didn’t agree to the terms.
But then I went ahead and used the site anyway. Someone who didn’t agree to the terms would never do such a thing. It is a very silly idea of mine.
It should also make a record showing that you never saw the agreement and did not click the button. Maybe it could aggregate these records to show that for a given website there are thousands of users who have never seen the TOS.
Given that most people seem to think these click-through agreements are already pretty weak from a legal standpoint, I wonder how much more it would take to make them completely worthless.
There are people who do similar things but sign "Daffy Duck" or even "Barack Obama". Someday they'll be in for a surprise visit.
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.
Aka “wire fraud”, if you’re a DA.
Though, GDPR stipulates that if it's a legal requirement for the service to work (which is the case) then it's not required to log visitor approval.
TLDR:
- Someone is suing Uber for discrimination because drivers didn't allow the person's guide dog in the car.
- Uber's terms state users can't sue Uber and must go through Uber's arbitration process
- Uber's terms were presented in the "By continuing you agree to these terms" fashion
- Person claimed they never agreed to arbitration and that they should be allowed to sue Uber, and a state court agreed
> But the broader impact of the ruling is to put companies on notice that they can't bind users to restrictive terms merely by linking to those terms somewhere in a site or app's registration process. In order to create a legally binding contract, a tech company has actually put the terms in front of the user and get them to affirmatively agree to them.
[0] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/01/court-says-uber-...
However, your idea of an installer is novel. The problem is that it adds friction to the install process than would turn many users away.
I did for a while in the beginning but now its just too much.
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.
Even if only some sections are standardized and others not, that would be a comparative win. Maybe an "exceptions/additions" part.
Edit: also, there are some few sites I recall that summarized terms and/or pointed out problematic parts, to help someone who cared but didn't want to read them all. I might be able to hunt up (a) link(s) if desired.
What I do currently is read them once, mentally note the date displayed, save them, and when they change, use a short script to make it easy to see differences (uses fmt to make lines to shorter first, and get sometimes fewer differences that way). Sometimes I have pushed back and contacted the organization, or just not used them. I wrote a bunch of complaints about this kind of thing, at my site -- it takes us further down the slippery slope of saying things we don't mean to each other, habitually, which is sadly dishonest IMO.
They say "Stonecutters publishes legal forms and clauses for other legal craftsmen to incorporate by reference."
Once when at a nearby hospital to just get a blood sample drawn, the documents to sign including those by reference were ~11 pages. Fortunately they weren't busy, & I tried to apologize for taking so long & explained I felt it was a matter of honesty to know what I was agreeing to, and they printed things for me and let me cross some of it out. But I found that another nearby hospital system (a regional nonprofit w/ good reputation) had a 2-page agreement, and I go there now even though it is slightly farther for us. (It unfortunately seems like on medical stuff, it helps to get as much as possible covered before the visit, also for financial questions, making sure everyone is in-network etc etc, so I am now trying to remember to ask for everything in advance sometimes.)
The classic example is a company wanting me to work on some open source software and potentially put in patches on it but having a clause in their contract that assigns all rights to the software I produce to them.
They don't often read them themselves to see if they are sensible or correct before sending them. The entire situation is really dumb, no one anywhere in the process seems to read them.
There is a law governing TOS terms, and it says among other things that the TOS can't contain unexpected und unrelated terms.
So if you write for example into the TOS governing your website something like that every visitor owes you 1000 bucks that won't be enforceable.
The TOS related legislation is nothing new. It was there already in the analog age to prevent companies form tricking people into signing inappropriate contracts.
One of the younger team members asked me if he could use one of the machines to compile homework for another course. Given that the machine wasn't critical, I said certainly! (Applauding his initiative)
A week later, the department sys admin sends me an email, noting our server pegged cpu and men utilization briefly and asking if we required additional resources.
I responded, laid out exactly what happened (omitting the student's name), thank him for the attention, and tell him we don't need anything.
At which point he drops me from the email chain, writes to the professor in charge of our group (a guy doing some really interesting stuff in AUUVs, and only teaching undergrads out of the kindness of his heart), and launches into a tirade about students abusing system resources, unfair advantages, violations of the honor code, academic integrity cases, etc.
After discussing it with my professor, I send the admin an email apologizing for the misunderstanding, will make sure it won't happen again, and would appreciate if he raised concerns with me first next time.
To which professor receives another email about "not letting students contact him about faculty matters." My prof told me to stop emailing him, which I wisely listened to. The student's name was never shared, and no actions were taken.
But my takeaway was that kid almost had his academic career (and potentially his future) trashed, because someone decided to get a bee in their bonnet over an interpretation of rules.
... As a happy ending, I happened to know the BOFH in social circles outside of academia (doubt he linked me to my school self) and subsequent to this interaction his marriage collapsed, he moved to his farm, and eventually left university and took up an in depth study of the copious and frequent application of alcohol. Couldn't have happened to a nicer guy...
This is the part of the story where I really did a double take. This sys admin originally emailed you about cpu utilization, right? It's not like you didn't have their email or hadn't been in contact before.
They were having none of it. It's possible I just got a jerk.
If a TOS is important enough to a company that they're willing to impose a two hour waiting period on customers, I'd say that's their prerogative. It would likely be effective in getting many users to read the agreements.
In any case, I think it's fair to say that reading all of the test, thinking about how you want to approach it, and not just blindly following the ordering provided is going to be better than a naive approach - no matter what ordering is chosen.
For me I found that doing the ones I knew immediately how to solve first and then going back to the ones I didn’t quite get at first made those easier when revisiting. I think maybe getting my brain into context made referencing that information possible and possibly by reading them and moving on, it gave my brain some time to begin processing them. No idea though.
Same idea applies to IKEA assembly. Read all the directions first.
Here is a list of unfair contract terms that will likely cause an EULA or ToS to have no legal binding at all:
https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/consumers/unfair-treat...
Also all consumer disputes below a certain amount have to be resolved by consumer referees, so no binding arbitration clauses here either.
There is no legal requirement you agree to use the service. The system may prevent access but that's not a legal requirement.
A core component would be standardising clauses so they could be handled individually and automatically. If you’ve already answered the clause, and the parameters (time spans, quantities) were within the range you’d set, it would be ‘green’ and could be hidden. Clauses which you had answered but are outside your criteria would be ‘amber’, and unanswered clauses would be ‘red’. As you process more agreements, your can save answers to your profile so the process becomes more optimised over time.
One concern I'd have is that the level of access I'm willing to give websites isn't always universal, even within the same category. On the other hand, there's some things I really just don't care about and whatever website can help themselves. Just something to consider.
Another component would be the ability to rigorously diff agreements as they change, only those components that change or are in some way dependant are presented for attention.
Well then you should be bothered by lots of legal documents/terms of service, many of which say...
"blah blah blah. if you live in california you have specific rights"
A friend told me of a lawyer he knew that would cross out the binding arbitration clause in all legal documents he signed. In california you have the right to opt-out of binding arbitration.
So the last bit of many documents frequently nullifies other things above.
I had a similar one, in fairness it started with something along the lines of: "read these instructions completely before you start".
It is like a function that changes behavior after the first time in executes. The first execution will still do what it says. You have to explicitly call out that you want the last step that modifies the previous steps to be ran first.
It is like when I help someone learning to code and they question why their statement on line 30 doesn't change what is happening on line 15.
― Philip K. Dick, Ubik
- They need to prove that "you" accessed the service, not somebody claiming to be you, somebody with the same full name and rough location as you, etc.
- Websites are often pretty bad at actually requiring ToS acceptance to register. The fact that you've accessed the service doesn't necessarily imply you've accepted anything.
- Even if registration is ironclad, accessing the service won't prove you agreed to any particular version of the ToS. The ever popular amend-at-will clauses never hold up in court, so you really do need to know which version was agreed to.
- ToS are often presented coercively. Maybe you've already signed a lease and moved in, but to actually pay your rent you need to accept an additional one or more third-party ToS because the landlord doesn't accept cash or checks. Maybe you've already paid for your vehicle registration, and after the cash is removed from your account you're presented with additional terms that need to be agreed to in order to receive your tags. Even if you've agreed to some specific contract, that kind of coercion can invalidate the additional terms, even though the party whose ToS you agreed to might not have known about the coercion.
ToSes are mostly useless. They generally contain a line that indicates the terms can change at any time and you accept them by continuing to use the service.
You generally don't have a lawyer around to explain every TOS you come across, so people ignore them and hope for the best.
Hmm - I wonder if there would be a niche for a website that explains specific, common TOSs in easy to understand terms?
HN make it so!
https://www.thewindowsclub.com/summary-of-terms-and-conditio...
And elsewhere in this discussion is a list of prior such discussions that might mention others (you could Ctrl+F for my username here to find it, I replied to the list).
They say "Stonecutters publishes legal forms and clauses for other legal craftsmen to incorporate by reference."
For the sake of demonstration, I just went and read the first seven sections of Personal Capital's TOU. Not a single surprise in there, so far. To give one example, section 5 just says that for the sake of displaying the information you are agreeing that personal capital can retrieve on your behalf, personal capital has your authorization to act legally on your behalf. This is to prevent some idiot from suing them for fetching account info that said idiot inputted into personal capital. Another section says, hey, we aren't responsible for mistakes you make with your investments, even if you base your decisions on the information we show to you. Which is a perfectly reasonable thing as well -- you literally could not run a service like this otherwise.
If people were regularly burned by these legal documents then maybe, but I expect that literally nobody or their friends ever had any issues, so most people will accept that that applies for them too.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verwaltungssprache
Which kind of translates into Officialese as per Wikipedia.
Defining words is not enough, the grammar and sentence formulation are also very convoluted in regards to the common language.
Terms of service is generally easier to read because it's more simplified and typically doesn't use Latin or existing legal language that is uncommon to the layperson.
Of course, this is still in the context of U.S. law and the English/Latin language.
Or is this purely negotiating with HR and/or legal for contract terms concessions without hiring manager as it doesn't come from their budget?
As long as you are polite but firm, they aren’t likely to think anything. They’ll just figure they either like your profile and want to work with you, or they’ll figure they know they can’t meet your requests.
Always present flexibility even if you aren’t actually flexible. In theory, if they cannot give a severance package, maybe they can give a much higher sign on bonus, or something else you want. Let them know what’s important to you, but that if there are other ways to address what you’re looking for, you’re open to hear it and think about it.
Once you’re at the stage of making concrete requests, don’t be vague and don’t accept vague alternatives. Always ask for concrete alternatives and once it is stated, always take time to think about it offline, always. That way if you decide you’re not actually flexible, you have breathing room to process your decision and respond.
You should also project confidence about your worth and why you are asking for something.
For example, for negotiating a severance package, you should be very clear about it. In my case, that mattered to me because I was relocating to a new area and at the same time I was switching from individual contributor to manager. I felt the risk of the local job market for an inexperienced manager was high, so if the company I was joining would have restructuring or sudden cuts and I am laid off, the money to float myself in the new region would be high. To feel comfortable about this, I just wanted to know for sure if that kind of change was coming, I would have X months of salary as a cushion.
If a recruiter or hiring manager is too immature to appreciate this as a sincere concern / request of a candidate, and would punish me just for asking either by acting like severance is a taboo way to protect insecurities of being fired or acting like I’m a prima donna, well that makes the decision to walk away pretty obvious for me.
The main thing is just remember they don’t owe you any special features in a job offer and they absolutely won’t offer them unless you ask and make it clear it matters to you.
But you also don’t owe them anything either, certainly not any expectation about being “too fussy” or “scaring” them. Nobody’s going to look out for what you want as a candidate except you.
As long as you’re polite but firm, and you make clear asks and require clear commitments, you should feel completely confident asking for anything you want. Whether you’re willing to compromise or you need to say “no,” you’ll be doing yourself a big favor.
- you have a specific skillset and experience that give you a negotiating position not enjoyed by most, or
- most developers are significantly underestimating their negotiating position
They've invested a significant amount of time finding you, and assuming you're good at what you do, it's going to take a lot to find another acceptable candidate.
Nobody wants to have to report that the candidate didn't start because of something relatively minor, so restart the hiring machine.
(And yes, I think german law has the right principle there: clauses which are "unexpected" to an average consumer are invalid with consumers (different in B2B context), thus risk as consumer is low when blindly accepting)
It is like a child signing a contract. The child isn't bound to it, but the other party is. In this case, a corporation attempted to use an extreme disparity in knowledge and power to take advantage of a much weaker party. The disparity is larger than that between an average adult and an average child. As a consequence of this, it seems just as fair as in the case of contracts signed by children.
I don't know if I'd go that far. There's a whole class of laws around protecting children (two quick examples here in the US: age of consent; being tried as a minor vs tried as an adult) because the reality is that, in general, children are easier than adults to exploit. I mean, I convinced my nephew over the holiday that eating all his broccoli was like doing extra credit for Santa Claus, so it would cancel out the naughty action of eating one of the cookies he put out for Santa.
Saying that an adult agreeing to an unread ToS is unenforceable because we don't hold children accountable for signed contracts is plain nonsense.
You are able and chose not to. (Unless maybe you have a mental disability and then some caretaker)
Accept button clicking is not witnessed. Any contract so-signed should be good for all of $10 worth of dispute. No more.
Without ToS’s companies might have to spend some small amount of money on court proceedings they would prefer to avoid. A portion of those lawsuits may be worthwhile.
So I do not see how the overall idea can be dismissed as nonsense.
