Slashdot Mirror
Consumer Campaigners Read T&C Of Their Mobile Phone Apps To Prove a Point (bbc.com)
From a BBC report: Norwegians have spent more than 30 hours reading out terms and conditions from smartphone apps in a campaign by the country's consumer agency. The average Norwegian has 33 apps, the Norwegian Consumer Council says, whose terms and conditions together run longer than the New Testament. To prove the "absurd" length, the council got Norwegians to read each of them out in real time on their website. The reading finished on Wednesday, clocking in at 31:49:11. Some of the world's most popular apps were chosen, including Netflix, YouTube, Facebook, Skype, Instagram and Angry Birds. Finn Myrstad from the Norwegian Consumer Council, said: "The current state of terms and conditions for digital services is bordering on the absurd."
attorneys making bank
Has anyone read Slashdot's T&C? There are some onerous things in there, too. It's not exactly short or easy to understand. This is pretty common, unfortunately. And Slashdot is no better.
Reading them online for hours is equally stupid. At least it go some attention.
Just another product of our litigious society. What do you call 100 lawyers at the bottom of a lake?
Is that thirty-one hours or thirty-one days?
The only reason these EULAs and T&Cs are getting so long is because UGC is automatically copyright -- to the user. Even just transmitting the UGC back to the user himself is a violation of copyright law unless you have a licensing agreement through a EULA/T&C.
No, it means we need standardized T&C for software, without the ability for vendors to drop onerous changes on us with minimal notice.
It's time to commodify software to the benefit of users rather than to the benefit of the vendor.
Make useful software and charge whatever you want, but tricks should be forbidden.
Vast majority of all that garbage we have to stuff in there is legal ass-covering in a certain overly litigatory country that starts with "U".
If you get your apps from F-Droid, you can easily read the T and C in under an hour.
If you wouldn't try suing us when we do something not specifically mentioned in specific legal terms then you might get more layman friendly terms.
T&C? T&C? Hell, I won't even read TFA. Sometimes I can't be bothered to read the entire TFS. Hell with any T&C.
Make that "bordering on the absurd" for cargo pant values of "bordering".
In the new world, the "explorers" were attempting to trade with the natives, and they offered up an iPhone or Android app "just as soon as we complete a mandatory oral ceremony around the camp fire" they'd be saying "just give us the fucking glass beads already!" long before this obligatory oratory concluded.
Not so different from today's youth.
is there a gold standard EULA that isn't so bad for the user? I envision creating one, and marketing it as a magic icon next to a service's EULA that means the equivalent of "we're not going to totally screw you" that leave the user feeling better about the service. does anyone know of such a thing? a quick search didn't reveal anything
If the Terms and Conditions or Terms of Service are too long to read, just reject them and do not use the product. If you refuse to do this then you have earned the abuse that is coming to you.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
So what is interesting is that 100 years ago, most business was transacted on trust. Shaking someone's hand and trusting them to be honest. Then we got into a lot of legalese. But now we've gone back - there is *so much* legalese around *everything* that we are back to doing business based on trust again. We buy apps from companies that we generally trust. We do business online based on reputations of companies. So the legalese has peaked and now we don't even pay attention to it anymore. It's interesting how we have gone full circle.
Just because I can hook a shark from a boat, I do no offer to wrestle it in the water.
Ha, if a TTIP-like agreement goes through, it won't even matter if a sovereign nation attempts to do something about this sort of corporate over reach anymore. The company will just sue the country for hurting its profits!
I hate to be the one to inform you of this, but we passed that landmark 15 years ago between Sony, EA, and Microsoft.
The attorneys make bank for navigating the over 60,000 pages of codified federal statues and regulations, plus the uncodified ones (just the LIST of uncodified laws is 1,400 pages), plus an equal amount of state law. Of course those are just a tiny fraction of the total law. With my eyes closed, I clicked a random bit of the Slashdot Terms & Conditions; this is what came up:
The Sites may contain links to other web sites operated by third parties, other than affiliates of the Company (âoeLinked Sitesâ). We neither control nor endorse such other web sites, nor have we reviewed or approved any content that appears on the Linked Sites.
Why do you figure that's in there? Because sometimes sue a site for linking to another site that was bad in some way. Plaintiff says "it's your fault Slashdot, you linked to them (thereby endorsing them), and I trusted your endorsement. Case law is another several hundred thousand pages of crap that the T&C is meant to protect against.
Something like http://creativecommons.org/cho... ?
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
Yet, Facebook is still installed on my phone.
TL;DR
“I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. You shall have no other gods before Me.
2 “You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth; you shall not bow down to them nor serve them. For I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and fourth generations of those who hate Me, but showing mercy to thousands, to those who love Me and keep My Commandments.
3 “You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain, for the Lord will not hold him guiltless who takes His name in vain.
4 “Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord your God. In it you shall do no work: you, nor your son, nor your daughter, nor your male servant, nor your female servant, nor your cattle, nor your stranger who is within your gates. For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and hallowed it.
5 “Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long upon the land which the Lord your God is giving you.
6 “You shall not murder.
7 “You shall not commit adultery.
8 “You shall not steal.
9 “You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.
10 “You shall not covet your neighbor's house; you shall not covet your neighbor's wife, nor his male servant, nor his female servant, nor his ox, nor his donkey, nor anything that is your neighbor's.”
Have you fscked your local propeller head today?
A government agency should right up a generic TOS, with appropriate safeguards for consumer rights as well as for the corporation. Even include a reasonable requirement for arbitration (one that works both ways - they can't sue you if you can't sue them).
Then we could say that you can only get consent by click if the TOS was approved by the agency. Otherwise, you would need a real, actual ink on paper signature to get consent for TOS.
Nice compromise - corps can still create bullshit TOS, but they need to get you to sign paper to use that.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
I tried reading a T&C once. This is what happened:
1) Go to my credit card website to pay bill.
2) Says that they changed their system; have to create a new account.
3) Spend 2 hours reading the T&C.
4) Click accept.
5) Website reports session has timed out (due to 2 hours spent reading T&C).
6) Copy & paste T&C into text file #1.
7) Log back into site.
8) Copy & paste T&C into text file #2.
9) diff text files #1 and #2 to make sure T&C haven't changed in the last 2 hours.
10) Click accept more quickly this time.
11) Website reports technical difficulty and to try again later.
12) Come back the next day and try to login again.
13) Logs into my account just fine; no longer need to create a new account or agree to T&C.
I have been avoiding any product or web site with long, required TOS for a long time. One of the great things about Free software is that whey it says "BSD" or "GPL" or such, you know what you're getting and that's nice. When my doctor's office wants me to update my symptoms online, I remind them that the terms contained promises I knew I might not keep, so I strongly prefer not to use that site (they're very good about it, fortunately!).
And I talk to people about it. I was going to comment online on an letter published by a local newspaper, but wrote the editors instead saying why I didn't: because not even the lawyers who wrote the terms would actually read such things in most sites they use, and it's not honest to expect people to agree to things almost no one reads, and they don't really expect anyone to read.
Now if the rest of you would do what I'm doing, maybe after a while they would pay more attention...? It's a request.
(Most sites don't actually require you to agree first. There are a couple of sites I use anyway, where I had to agree. But I read and saved those terms with a date, and they're the exceptions that were really worth it to me. If anyone asks in the next day or so I can share the letter I sent to those newspaper editors and you can do similarly. I read some years ago that some of those terms -- the ones that say you agree to any changes without notice by continuing to use the site -- were struck down in the USA's 9th circuit court, but I don't know the latest on that.)
If we all quietly accept a status of making laws no one follows, and agreeing to terms no one reads, we move farther on a fast slippery slope toward the rule of men, instead of the rule of law, because now everyone is a lawbreaker and can be manipulated by people. Students of history know it's been done. Right??
I imagine I read slashdot's terms once, but it's been a long time and I don't remember. It's hard to be perfect at this. Sigh.
A Free, fast personal organizer for touch typists: onemodel
FTA: "The current state of terms and conditions for digital services is bordering on the absurd."
No, the state of terms and conditions for all kinds of "intellectual property" passed "absurd" at break-neck speed more than a decade ago. The current state of IP laws and terms is chewing-LSD-infused-magic-mushrooms-while-watching-Eraserhead-and-reading-Kafka-batshit-fucking-crazy. Absurd isn't even a tiny speck in the rear-view mirror.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
Really, these sorts of "gun to the head" agreements should simply be made unenforceable. No, you can't actually get people to "agree" to handing over a spare kidney to you by slipping that requirement into paragraph 2,532 on page 845 of a 9,000 page document, and companies shouldn't be able to slip other onerous language in there either. The simplest solution is for courts to require actually-informed consent when asked to enforce a contract, and refuse to enforce "click-through" contracts, because those contracts do not involve informed consent.
Because a contract without informed consent isn't really a contract. And, no, presenting a 10,000 paragraphs document of legalese to a consumer isn't "informed" consent. Those agreements are written so as to confound understanding by anyone BUT a lawyer, and even then, lawyers will often haggle over the meaning of phrases based on the positions of punctuation. By definition, then, there can be no informed consent.
Who did what now?
I rather disagree with the conclusion "The current state of terms and conditions for digital services is bordering on the absurd."...
It has long ago passed the border and is still accelerating!
If you have to sign a contract after you buy a product, then you have the right to return that product. It may not mean much for downloaded software, but returning a product means a lot to hardware distributors, like cell phones themselves and computers and gaming machines. I returned multiple laptops because the Microsoft license was too long and I disagreed with the "Kill switch" option they put in their among other things. I have returned an XBOX because they only let you read 4 or 5 lines of the agreement at a time and it took me about 10 minutes to scroll down through it at full speed (not the speed at which I could read it). So I returned it. The store doesn't like it, but it certainly isn't my fault. So buy products and return them. I expect if more people did this, the contracts would become more reasonable to understand.