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.
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-...
– 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..
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.
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?
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."
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.
