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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."
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.
A good start.
We should sue whoever is responsible.
This has nothing to do with a litigious society.
T&C's are this way because nobody in their right mind would accept them if they weren't obfuscated beyond comprehension.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Funny how they call it "bordering on the absurd". I think we've gotten well across that border by now.
You are missing the point.
These are the average 33 apps the average citizen has installed. You need to know ALL OF THEM as they are not perfectly identical, and you need to somehow remember which T&C is connected to which app.
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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.
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.
Well, I'm sure SOME of the terms are the same from app to app (especially seeing that Google maps, youtube, and gmail are all owned by google). Google Lawyers need to implement subroutines in their TOS language, or some other equivalent. For instance, a standard set of terms that apps could call upon to reference in their own TOS. This would have the effect of:
Making it quicker to write.
Making it quicker to read.
Helping the end user remember what the terms are.
Making it use up less memory on the device.
For code, it just makes sense. I don't know why the legal industry hasn't adopted this yet.
TL;DR
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
This has nothing to do with a litigious society. T&C's are this way because nobody in their right mind would accept them if they weren't obfuscated beyond comprehension.
Like that BSD license an AC quoted?:
THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND CONTRIBUTORS "AS IS" AND ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.
Every word of that blob has come because some lawyer somewhere has managed to twist contract law, liability law, tort law or some other crazy law to say you're on the hook. Really all you needed to say is:
This software is provided "as-is" without any warranty.
That's it really. You're not promising it does anything now, you're not promising it will do anything in the future. The rest is just crap, if you tell me you're going to do something stupid with it I shouldn't have the burden of convincing you otherwise.
Terms & conditions are the product of decades of such crap piling up, every time a lawyer goes for a crazy loophole you clam it up with more legalese because hey, who cares? Nobody reads it anyway. In fact, maybe it's not even your product but you read about someone else's case and preemptively add it to your T&C. Be honest, despite all the legalese how often has any company actually used it? For the most part I pay, they deliver. If they don't deliver, I don't pay. That seems to work with 90% of the companies and resolve 90% of the conflicts with the reminder and the last 1% I just dispute the bill and see if they'll take me to court. No takers yet.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Not likely. Contract terms that a reasonable person would not expect to see in a contract of that type are almost guaranteed to be found unconscionable.
The really funny thing about having onerous T&Cs that the average person can't understand or reasonably be expected to read is that you run the risk of a court deciding that no contract was actually entered into by the other party. When you're writing contracts that an average person is expected to enter into without consulting a lawyer, giant thirty-page legal documents are, IMO, very risky. This is doubly true when the perceived gain by the individual is small (e.g. access to an app or website), the perceived effort involved in reading the T&Cs is large, and (as a result of that incongruity) more than 99% of your users don't bother to actually read the T&C at all and, at best, rapidly scroll through it just to get to the bottom where you hid the "I agree" button.
IMO, when writing things like this, you should give your lawyers a one-page limit. If they can't express the terms and conditions in one page, then the terms are too complex or too onerous for a typical person to be expected to comply with them anyway, and you need to seriously rethink what you're doing. They'll probably balk and give you back something that's two pages long, but at least it won't be thirty. :-)
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You are missing the point.
These are the average 33 apps the average citizen has installed. You need to know ALL OF THEM as they are not perfectly identical, and you need to somehow remember which T&C is connected to which app.
I summarize all Ts&Cs the same way, so I only have to keep one concept in mind:
- You the consumer sign away all rights to anything and we the supplier own whatever data comes within grabbing reach of our app. No part of this Ts&Cs can be invalidated even if the great majority of it is illegal horseshit. Sign here:
If anything is less evil than this, great - if not then I will never be unhappily surprised.
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
Actually what's needed is a standard set of terms and conditions that apply by default to all applications that everyone agrees is reasonable (consumer and producer) and then only where a developer wants to impose something different should they have to say where they vary from it. This is what happens in other scenarios where the public interact with companies.
You don't have to read a massive 'terms and conditions' contract when you check into a hotel since there are consumer protection laws about how hotels can treat their customers and laws to protect the hotel from abuses by customers such as theft of towels or trashing of rooms. Similarly when you buy a burger there are generally accepted conditions about the food being fit for human consumption and health departments who enforce it.
Otherwise we'd have to spend forever reading through terms and conditions every time we interacted with companies. As a society we decided that a level of standard regulation made life better for everyone. This is what we need for apps, for websites and for online services.