Slashdot Mirror
The 'Terms and Conditions' Reckoning Is Coming (bloomberg.com)
Everyone from Uber to PayPal is facing a backlash against their impenetrable legalese. From a report: Personal finance forums online are brimming with complaints from hundreds of PayPal customers who say they've been suspended because they signed up before age 18. PayPal declined to comment on any specific cases, but says it's appropriate to close accounts created by underage people "to ensure our customers have full legal capacity to accept our user agreement." While that may seem "heavy-handed," says Sarah Kenshall, a technology attorney with law firm Burges Salmon, the company is within its rights because the users clicked to agree to the rules -- however difficult the language might be to understand.
Websites have long required users to plow through pages of dense legalese to use their services, knowing that few ever give the documents more than a cursory glance. In 2005 security-software provider PC Pitstop LLC promised a $1,000 prize to the first user to spot the offer deep in its terms and conditions; it took four months before the reward was claimed. The incomprehensibility of user agreements is poised to change as tech giants such as Uber Technologies and Facebook confront pushback for mishandling user information, and the European Union prepares to implement new privacy rules called the General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR. The measure underscores "the requirement for clear and plain language when explaining consent," British Information Commissioner Elizabeth Denham wrote on her blog last year.
Websites have long required users to plow through pages of dense legalese to use their services, knowing that few ever give the documents more than a cursory glance. In 2005 security-software provider PC Pitstop LLC promised a $1,000 prize to the first user to spot the offer deep in its terms and conditions; it took four months before the reward was claimed. The incomprehensibility of user agreements is poised to change as tech giants such as Uber Technologies and Facebook confront pushback for mishandling user information, and the European Union prepares to implement new privacy rules called the General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR. The measure underscores "the requirement for clear and plain language when explaining consent," British Information Commissioner Elizabeth Denham wrote on her blog last year.
PayPal has always struck me as one of the more slimy online companies. Guess who was one of the founders?
I just ask my 4 year old to do it.
there was a "Fuck your T&C but I'd like to use your service without them" button.
A crude measure of whether a piece of text is easy to read is something like the Flesch-Kinkaid reading ease metric which does simple measurements of average sentence length and average word length, assuming that longer words in longer sentences are more difficult to read. It kind-a-sort-a works.
A better idea would be to require users to pass a reading test made from the EULA text itself. The two most accurate I know of are the Open Cloze test, where every 7th word is left blank and users have to write/type in the correct word, or the C-Test, which is a little more complicated to explain but more valid and reliable and more fun to do (students really enjoy doing this type of test!)
Requiring users to pass a reading comprehension test, using the EULA text, would ensure that whoever clicks on "Accept" understands what they're agreeing to.
Debate is a form of harassment. Do not question my truth.
A country voted in an idiot for their president based on tweets and likes. I don't think we can dumb TOS down far enough to fix the problem.
suspended is better then in jail/prison form the CFAA law. As braking that TOS / EULA make you be an user without authorization
I think a relatively strong legal argument could be made that these TnC agreements and Eula agreements are signed under a form of duress. In most cases there is a specific need for that one tool or service and the users have no ability to change or negotiate.
I know it may not technically be duress in the strictest sense but in a world where McDonalds can lose a suit for serving coffee that is hot why cant this work?
South Park parodied this back in 2011
I Agreed by Accident
There is even an article about HumancentiPad
reading test?? what about an BAR test?
As some of the stuff in the EULA you need to be an lawyer to under stand what they are talking about.
Obama's administration is over, just let it go.
That's what you get for providing enough data that they could determine you're underage. Doubly so if they're complaining about it on public forms. "I broke this rule and got caught. How dare they!"
Terms of Service aren't that hard to read. After you read a couple of them you get the used to their type of language. You can argue for years about individual wording issues, but all the main points are pretty clear. Most people are just lazy. They think they can't understand them so they don't bother to try. I'll forgive the people on mobile devices who are given a three line textbox to read the terms.
Maybe we need to start creating boiler plate or set of common named terms & conditions? While there would still be the usual legal jargon, at least there is a community built around understanding what the contract is trying to achieve, since it is reused in other places. Think Creative Commons, GPL and MIT licenses for example.
Maybe a checkbox system, where you specify what you want from the contract and then the legalese would be generated, but at least there would be a similar high level view to the user?
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Are ToS an actual legal document?
Why do they exist in the first place?
So long as that arbitration clause remains valid. The rules and laws are set up to support the terms and conditions that the more powerful player requires, and the arbitrator almost always sides with the bigger, more powerful player.
If Slashdot is going to post stories like this, they ought to not be hypocrites. The TOS for this site is just as bad as the examples described in the summary. Fix your own TOS, then complain about other sites.
Too bad the ownership of this site doesn't seem interested in actually improving it. There have been lots of promises and talk, but few results.
While that may seem "heavy-handed," says Sarah Kenshall, a technology attorney with law firm Burges Salmon, the company is within its rights because the users clicked to agree to the rules -- however difficult the language might be to understand.
I am shocked, SHOCKED, that a lawyer would approve of difficult to understand legalese.
I'm banned for life by Paypal. About a year ago they suspended my account, held onto all funds for 6 months and told me they'll never accept me as a customer ever again (they track SSN and CC numbers). I've no idea why because the customer support rep never said anything except that I should take my business elsewhere. I can only guess that they rate users / merchants by risk and are heavily culling any that blip above their line (which is pretty low). I sold software through a web site for $3.99 a pop and had a few customers claim their money back via Paypal (maybe 4 out of hundreds). Only one was ever valid, but there was absolutely no way to dispute a dispute with Paypal, so I just returned the money via the button they provided on the website. Now, Paypal can do what they like because they are a business, but I recommend no one ever use them for anything ever. If you are using them, go elsewhere and never rely on them to have your back.
Limit it to one Eula per entire product line and limit it to 6000 characters. If anyone complains, limit it to 3000.
What, you didn't realize that by posting on slashdot you agreed to indemnify sourceforge media? And to be sued in San Diego?
The measure underscores "the requirement for clear and plain language when explaining consent,"
Won't help. You could put a copy of Game of Thrones novels in those end-user license agreements and people still would not read them. No one reads that stuff. It's not going to matter if it's comprehensible to the layman or not.
Obviously, we need something entirely different to fill this void. It's obviously a problem, but how do you re-train the enitre population to start reading that stuff? Tall order there. Good luck!
If we are fighting "incomprehensibility ", let's start with the IRS.
Buy why suspend them? Why not just ask them to re-click?
I suppose you could do like some of the game copy protections of old used to do.
"Please enter the 4th word on the 6th paragraph to agree."
Probably still won't help.
I understand that all softwares have their purpose and the owner want to control how users are interfacing with it to limit the potential for abuse, but having a multi-pages terms and condition agreement document is something that realistically no one will read. Maybe there could be some way of summarizing the terms and condition in a format that is easier to understand at a glance? I'm pretty some parts are common, so maybe establish a kind of symbology to quickly inform the user what they are allowed to do, or what they're getting into? Kind of like how the Creative Commons license uses some symbols to quickly identify the license type used. https://creativecommons.org/li...
This is definitely not the fault of the site or business owners. It's the fault of all of the litigious assholes looking to get rich quick by exploiting the legal system to do things it was never intended to do.
So the GDPR forces companies to do what the Plain English Campaign has been trying to do for a long time now. That's nice.
"Everybody's naked underneath" -- The Doctor
is to make all legal documents and laws as simple as possible and understandable by a high school student. Unfortunately that will never happen as laws and legal documents are essentially written in order to create more work for lawyers and considering that most judges are lawyers first, the only people with power to make any changes are the people invested in keeping the system working the exact same way it always has.
Violating a Website's Terms of Service Is Not a Crime, Federal Court Rules https://yro.slashdot.org/story/18/01/11/003246/violating-a-websites-terms-of-service-is-not-a-crime-federal-court-rules/ - so much for "terms of service"!
* Still, I am IMPRESSED by security site vendor PCPitstop paying up... why?
They do pay up & DID ME RIGHT (unexpectedly - I just did it for the heck of it + good of others) for a security guide I did for Windows on their site JANUARY 2008 https://forums.pcpitstop.com/topic/152256-january-winners// that actually was from a DECADE++ prior from other sites before it (extended it & made it better) that is ALL about "layered-security"/"defense-in-depth" (best thing we have going).
APK
P.S.=> Those "terms" can often EXORBITANT & UNCONSCIONABLE (illegal in legal agreements along w/ being underage, under an influence of drugs or alcohol etc. - I know this for a FACT as I took BUSINESS LAW I/II & especially paid attention to CONTRACTUAL LAW (along w/ computer books? Only ones I saved since 1985 during my 1st of 2 degrees))...apk
The simplified terms and conditions will be "We own you. Don't like it?, go pound sand." Same as now, but much easier to read and understand.
Consider filing it as a class-action or whatever the EU equivalent is. They have been doing that for over 15 years now and they really need both the scrutiny of a major lawsuit and the bad public PR when these stories start getting publicized. Doing so could at minimum trigger sanctions against them and maximum get them heavily regulated by the EU, either of which would be good for people all over the world.
That's just the problem. Those two requirements are mutually exclusive. You can have language that's clear (i.e. explains exactly and precisely what you're consenting to), or you can have language that's plain (simple to read and understand). Except for a few broad, general cases, you can't have both.
e.g. Consider the EULA terms for a photo sharing service. Your photos are protected by your copyright, but the service needs to be able to keep a copy.
But wait, it's not enough just to keep a copy of the photo. For the photo to be shared, another copy needs to be produced on the visitor's computer.
But wait, the service right now is a photo sharing service. What if they decide to change in the future into something more? So you can't just call it 'service', you have to define exactly what that service is.
But wait, what if one of those other users decides to keep a copy of said photo? The service doesn't want to be sued for such actions since that's out of its control.
But wait, what if some of those users are employed by the service? That creates a loophole where the service could hire third parties to sell and distribute unauthorized copies, free from fear of being sued for copyright infringement.
But wait, the service needs to keep backups of these photos in case they suffer a storage device failure. Such backups are prudent but not necessary to provide the service. And the clause you've just added makes the admin making the backups liable for copyright violation.
The anecdote about PC Pitstop is amusing, but tells us nothing. How many users agreed to their terms and conditions in those four months? If it was four, the story doesn't make the desired point. If it was four million, it's one of the most spectacular object examples ever. Having never heard of PC Pitstop, I'd guess it was more likely a small number than a huge one.
Hey, Stupid, had you actually been paying enough attention to know anything about the specific subject of PayPal and arbitration clauses, you'd know that PayPal was one of very very few companies that actually allowed people to OPT OUT of the arbitration clause when they introduced it.
How do I know this? I was actually paying attention and opted out. Sorry you weren't paying attention, there's likely no do-overs for that.
I reckon the terms and conditions need to be limited to 1 page (A4 or US letter) and of font 9 or larger.
There is no need, other than to hide stuff and discourage users to read it, for the terms and conditions to be so long.
Oh, it also keeps lawyers in business.
Calculate the average reading-with-comprehension speed of someone reading some given T&C stuff. For long T&C, that might be hours, especially considering that most people are not lawyers.
If someone clicks "Agree" before some reasonable fraction of the calculated time (e.g. 50%) then it is unlikely that there is any actual agreement, as the person clicking did not have time to comprehend what they are agreeing to.
So the solution is, for some agreement that takes 10 hours to comprehend, any "Agree" that is clicked before at least 5 hours have elapsed is non-binding.
Basically, there should be a law that says unless the person signing the contract actually understands what they are singing, then there is no contract.
User agreements, terms and conditions and even staff contracts are all utter bullshit. Contracts are supposed to be negotiated by the 2 sides, none of these are negotiated in any meaningful way, they are dictated by big companies who have the upper hand and accepted by users who really have no choice in the matter because the services offered are unique or they don't have the option financially to say no.
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
Companies need MUCH less leeway to dictate rules in the first place. There should NEVER be mandatory arbitration allowed in the first place for any service rendered. One consumer is in an unacceptable situation when they need a service and every provider requires draconian rules that are non-negotiable. Congress and the states should set the rules for doing business and companies who want to do business should have to comply. If your business plan requires short circuiting the rights of every last one of your customers you should not exist.
I think a lot of the contracts that we agree to aren't really necessary. Do you really need all these special things from me, instead of me just handing over the money?
The terms should be simple. Just to be clear, I don't mean simple terms as in written to be understandable by laymen. I mean the actual give-and-take --- deviations from a normal sale -- shouldn't involve much. I can buy a loaf of bread (here's the money, gimme the bread) without a contract. Same for books (at least if they're paper rather htan files).
I even remember the 1980s when I could go to a store and buy a box that contained a floppy with proprietary software for my C64 without ever agreeing to any license. I had simply bought a copy of the software. That's right, this wasn't even Free software and yet it still didn't need a license, either. Copyright was enough to handle it. "Ah, but we need a contract these days, so they can install the software on their hard disk, which involves copying, which would be illegal without a license." No, that's fair use or it should be, and Congress long ago threw that into copyright anyway.
But perhaps there are types of business that do require a little more complexity in the transaction than here's-the-money-gimme-the-product. For example, everyone wants me to not blame them if the product explodes in my face. Ok, but if everyone demands that and we're all always agreeing to that anyway, then maybe the law can just say that and we can trim a page off of a hundred contracts.
I suspect there are patterns for whole industries, where every company in that industry basically wants the same things. (And deviations are either minor, or they're oversights because someone doesn't have good lawyers writing the contracts.)
And that leads me toward wondering if this is part of what civil law is about. Are a lot of what we in America would have in contract terms, simply the law in, say, France? Does civil law result in simpler contracts, perhaps at the expense of more complicated law? Teach this ignorant American a thing or two. Please? :-)
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
wot u smoking mshash? nobody is caring anout t&c they just click through like good little sheep. fucking horseshit this article is, just like most of the crap you submit!
How could the underage users have agreed to this rule if they are saying that underage users don't "have full legal capacity to accept our user agreement."
the company is within its rights because the users clicked to agree to the rules
So their justification for booting out users who legally cannot be held to agree to the T&C's is that they agreed to the T&C's.
That said, if they are refunding any money the users have in their accounts, this isn't really worth a story. If they are seizing funds from minors on the basis that they are in violation of the agreement, then that would be extra scummy.
See subject & the rest listed here + why (butthurt ac who destroyed himself on hosts kernelmode) https://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=12012911&cid=56473441/ vs. slower usermode (the little fuck that's doing this is a SERIOUS screwup, lol, hence the WEAK butthurt effete attempts @ "impersonating" me, via harassing others).
* Unbelievable... lmao!
APK
P.S.=> That's probably the RESULT of being raised as a "soyboy" weasel for the whimp trying to make me look "bad" impersonating me - RoTfLmAo... apk
If large companies outcompete other smaller options and then force you to accept agreements to gain that sort of service then to me that sounds very bad
If a government requires you to have insurance and then all insurance companies require certain terms then effectively the government has made those terms into law surely this is not right
They're not trying to confuse you with the terms and conditions, and they're not trying to hide anything. They're just trying to not get sued. The ridiculous terms and conditions are not the fault of tech. They're the fault of lawyers.
The solution is probably something like food labeling. Require the important information to go in a standard, easily readable format. If the company is accurate within the context of that format, they should be indemnified from getting sued over whatever they would have put in the terms and conditions.
This is why sweden 'sweety' you lets muslims rape swede women + why you stalk me https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=12013759&cid=56476357/ & I called you out pussy!
* You're a no balls EUNUCH from a weak tribe of PUSSIES in Sweden - NO QUESTIONS ASKED!
APK
P.S.=> Swede women (good looking imo) DESERVE BETTER than whimp no ball weasels like you Zontar the Mindless - & the post you cut/paste of mine from today? Here https://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=12013759&cid=56475523/ ... apk
The real big problem with the T&C is that you don't gt to reach agreement. You either take it or leave it. That has to go. The other big shitter is that they get to change it at a whim, yet all you get to do is read about it via email *if you're lucky*, but if YOU want to ask to change the terms, there's no way to do that, and many, if not most ISPs don't accept an email (internet company) and a lot now don't even have a phone number to call for even leaving (but the sales line WILL add services and THAT one answers damn quick!).
The problem overall is that every fact and avenue makes it impossible for you to agree in a contract sense or deal with changes either (how do you disagree with a change in the T&C or even just the price change of service?), but everything makes it easy for them to do it.
Contracts of adhesion are inherently one-sided, but it evolves even more one sided with each change to make their selling easier and your participation in an agreement harder.
Once you've agreed, how do you change agreement? How many times do you think you're told you need to give at least one months' notice but if you give notice before 1 month from the end of the minimum term, they try to charge early cancellation? How do you stop their service without them claiming you owe them for breech of contract or loss or some other shit, even if they drop it later?
Now how do they stop your service? How do they change your contract?
Now how much do you think people stay in because it's just too hard to leave? Now do you think this is accidental?
PS a lot of places you can't use the library because either they're closing it down or all the places are taken (especially if it's a "modernised" one where they removed all or most of the books so it's now supposed to be check everything online and order book loans in). And what happens when so many decide to say fuck you to ISPs and use the public library?
Plus I bet you're one of the types hating on people using "your money" for their use (like welfare and "obama phones" and shit like that), how do you feel about your taxes going up to pay for the internet kiosks and connectivity to let these people have "free" internet? And you would then want the contracts to be changed so people don't and your taxes can go down again, right? Sure you would. So why not now BEFORE people leave in droves?
Maybe there's a market here. Users can pay to have each contract analyzed. Your friendly cloud service will summarize the contract for you, compare it with other contracts in the same industry, and point out how your contract varies from the norm. Etc.
Fiat Lux.