[c0nducktr]

Don't worry, they'll probably make signing up for binding arbitration part of the rental agreement, conveniently having the arbitration decided by someone who sides with the company 99% of the time. It's all good though. They're certainly not scamming you.

[const_cast]

Lately it feels like the most reputable and large companies are even running scams. The US feels filled to the brim with incredibly convoluted scams. We're innovating new ways to scam people out of their money every other day.

Man, just sell a product or service and be normal.

[fnordian]

People voted for that. Somehow they hate regulation and love to give companies all that freedom to scam them.

[fluidcruft]

It's pretty funny to contrast these practices against things IRBs can require. IRBs require informed consent and often require the entire "contract" be read aloud verbatim (no summarization) to people. This incentivizes making things as short and easy to comprehend has possible. Furthermore the IRB will decide whether the agreement is compressible to the intended audience.

Whereas in tech the opposite is true. The goal is to get people to agree to something they do not understand. This incentivizes long confusing walls of text and convoluted language so that people just click without reading.

Ultimately the difference is that when push comes to shove tech has not been required to prove people even read (much less understand) what they are signing.

[anonym29]

What's weird is not that companies would want to try to be greedy, but how society has socially normalized not even reading important, binding legal contracts with real consequences, and just signing them without much, if any, serious consideration of the ramifications of what we're agreeing to.

[atq2119]

What's actually weird is how society normalized binding contracts that are far too long to be reasonably read by the people they are supposed to be binding to.

A well functioning legal system would throw out everything in those contracts on that basis alone.

[avidiax]

If you buy a latte at a coffee chain and you use their app to pay, you've probably agreed to a hundred page agreement that they reserve the right to change at any time, and which subjects you to binding arbitration, perhaps even if you decide to hand the barista a $10 note.

Disney recently tried to use the terms and conditions of a Disney+ subscription to get out of a claim arising from their theme parks.

Automation has made it so easy to bury society in legally binding click-through contracts. It's very unclear what innovation or business model the general public would be deprived of if we severely limited click-through agreements, or even wet signature contracts below certain thresholds.