top | item 25714093

Terms of Service; Didn’t Read

188 points| hugoroy | 5 years ago |tosdr.org

168 comments

order

II2II|5 years ago

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 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.

joekrill|5 years ago

It's absolutely astounding to me how many folks blindly sign legal documents. Especially employment related. Whenever I've pushed back on an employment contract, NDA, or similar it's always met with sudden confusion - as though this has never happened before. In fairness, it's almost never met with negatively. But it shows that no one else has ever bothered to question it. And when I talk to colleagues I definitely get the sense that no one ever really reads these things or questions them.

LadyCailin|5 years ago

Just out of curiosity, what happened if you declined to sign? You flunk out of the course? Reading the TOS is pointless anyways, when declining them is very problematic for you.

alexfromapex|5 years ago

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.

vsareto|5 years ago

It's the same thing with leases and technology.

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.

banana_giraffe|5 years ago

When I went into sing my Mortgage Loan, the officer pointed at the X's and said "sign here, here, and initial here, here, and here"

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.

hnarn|5 years ago

I was kind of hoping that this was going to end along the lines of “I was actually studying law and the professor then called us out on the importance of reading contracts that you sign, and proceeded to list all the ridiculous things we had just agreed to”.

Too bad.

m463|5 years ago

What about objecting and still participating?

gorgoiler|5 years ago

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 agree" and then press accept, and see if they agreed to let me use the service anyway.

albertgoeswoof|5 years ago

This is why they’re non enforceable in a real court. If I put the rights to your inheritance in a tos no judge is actually going to enforce that, because no one would reasonably sign that away for access to a website.

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.

alsetmusic|5 years ago

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, but still get snared. SCs still go to jail.

chki|5 years ago

This will depend on your specific jurisdiction but just to give you an example of the law in Germany (which I expect to be similar in other places, especially in Europe where a EU-regulation was created on the basis of the German law):

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-...

khuzudin|5 years ago

This article is about a plug-in that recognizes TOS agreements and summarizes them for you. I've often wondered if it's feasible to create a plug-in that recognizes TOS agreements and clicks the Accept button for you.

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.

vntok|5 years ago

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.

13415|5 years ago

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.

mkl95|5 years ago

It should be fairly easy to do this with something like Hotjar. Although I'm not sure if it is legally feasible to do it without the user's consent, especially in Europe.

zxienin|5 years ago

The way website.com will start dealing with that, is to block end users to spend legally minimum amount of time on ToS.

hundchenkatze|5 years ago

Here's a case between Uber and a blind person [0].

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-...

stunt|5 years ago

Yes, as long as they make it a required step. It's your fault if you choose to not read it.

castorp|5 years ago

Ages ago I installed a shareware product. And it also had a scrollable "terms and condition" screen (about 2 pages long) when starting it for the first time. When you clicked the "I Agree" button too quickly it would ask you "Do you really agree to the terms you read in only 0.76 seconds?"

rdpintqogeogsaa|5 years ago

If there is an acceptance screen anyway, is there a reason not to tie this to actually reading the terms? Please consider the following idea:

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.

Moru|5 years ago

My favourites are the boxed games that comes with "If you break the seal you agree to our terms that you can read inside the box" style of agreements. Those are ofcourse not valid though so not a problem.

josefx|5 years ago

I have seen a few that forced you to at least scroll down before unlocking the accept button or included a thirty second countdown to keep you from clicking through.

PaulKeeble|5 years ago

The problem is more that every single piece of software and website and such did this and required you actually read it you would get nothing done all day but read agreements. I think the issue is the very need for all these agreements to begin with, we all know almost no one reads them.

I did for a while in the beginning but now its just too much.

dstick|5 years ago

That’s indeed a fun implementation. Most of my shareware memories consist of dark patterns and purple gorillas.

stunt|5 years ago

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.

1ncorrect|5 years ago

I’ve been chewing on an idea for a while around programmatically handling license agreements, basically each clause is checked atomically, with flow logic as necessary. You could have a personal profile, possibly multiple, of things you’ve decided to accept or reject beforehand, and the anomalous clauses would be presented as a list to review. Providers would have an incentive to reduce the friction by limiting scope to what’s actually required, not just what they want.

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.

dwighttk|5 years ago

Yeah let the lawyers argue over what the pictures mean and let us normals just have little pictures.

faeyanpiraat|5 years ago

Yes, this is great. Similar to how app permissions work on iOs.

albertgoeswoof|5 years ago

A centralised service that tracks all your tos agreements and changes would also be great. It would make things easier for developers as wel

forgingahead|5 years ago

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 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?

josefx|5 years ago

> 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.

PaulKeeble|5 years ago

The problem is the entire point is to hide all the nefarious things they can do with your data. Plenty of open source software has really straight forward agreements based on common terms but they can do that because they aren't working out scary ways to utilise your data to make money from you.

lcall|5 years ago

Yes, like we do with Creative Commons or FLOSS licenses, so you don't have any reason to read them more than once or occasionally. Whether somebody. Maybe something like the uniform commercial code, in the USA. That would be a nice contribution by some organization.

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.

herodotus|5 years ago

Yes, this is a big problem. In fact, in May 2019, I mad a semi-serious post about it (https://notdaily.com/blog/2019/05/05/you-are-a-liar-yes-you/)

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.

cosmodisk|5 years ago

I remember reading my bank's ToS at the time I was just out of the school. I read the whole piece, printed in font size 4 and the conclusion was like this: no matter what happens, it's my fault.

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.

absolutelyrad|5 years ago

Thought experiment: can we have a standard TOS for centralized services?

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.

joshka|5 years ago

I was thinking something similar the other day, but rather than a fully standard TOS, where I get to is that we need standard atomic pieces of contracts and TOS docs. For instance in the language in the definitions part about who the customer is, who the business is should be {common:customer-is-you, common:business-is-mybusinessname} or a part that talks about not using other customer's login information. Etc. Why should we have to read every single line when it's mostly the same? DRY the TOS.

novok|5 years ago

I think the compromise to TOS type things is they can only be limited to a list of house rules that you can enforce with or without an agreement, kind of like booting off a rowdy customer off of the property of your retail store. Like, ‘here are the rules’ and that is about it.

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK|5 years ago

Their scored system seems flawed. For example, both Facebook and Reddit have the same "E" score, while Facebook requires you to disclose your real identity and to link your phone, and Reddit doesn't. They are worlds away with regard to privacy.

tomgs|5 years ago

Sidenote: This is how you properly deal with massive load on your site: https://imgur.com/a/zKMh5zg

The "checkout our twitter" thing is especially cool.

rkagerer|5 years ago

Educational settings are one of the worst places where insidious terms crop up. You often simply don't have a choice.

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

Uninen|5 years ago

Are there any examples of minimal human-friendly Terms Of Service texts that one could use or adopt to their own projects?

lcall|5 years ago

I tried to make some for onemodel.org (in github, there is the file LICENSE, and CONTRIBUTING). But I did not have them reviewed by an attorney yet. But my offering is not an online service (yet); I have other thoughts stored away on that. But I've also read that attorneys can always find holes in things written by non-attorneys, so there's that.

pitspotter|5 years ago

I frequently get mails from banks and other service providers with subject lines like 'changes to our agreement'. I don't read those either. Mind you, it might be fun to send a few unilateral changes back their way, detailed in a suitably upbeat or condescending letter.

PaulKeeble|5 years ago

A few contracts I have done in the past I got the terms through and had serious issues with so just ended up blacking out and initially it or adding in an appendix. I don't think I have ever seen a company say a thing about a unilateral change to the contract I just made without negotiation, they like most simply people sign it and accept it without reading it.

ourmandave|5 years ago

Then the second biggest lie is:

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. =)

itronitron|5 years ago

I always thought "We value your privacy" was the biggest lie on the internet.

soylentgraham|5 years ago

The biggest confusion I have with the modern web is why these cookie agreements never remember that Ive agreed to them before.

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.

Daho0n|5 years ago

>Yep, we use cookies as well and we have to show it to you as we are based in Germany, sorry folks!

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.

JustinBack|5 years ago

Sorry for the confusion, the cookie notice was a fast implementation. Now, cookies will only be stored once you click the accept button. "No" will hide it for the on the current page.