Website Is Good For The Legal Bits
Does anyone actually read Conditions of Service statements on the Internet?
Or do we just tick the box and rush on, agreeing to whatever a website operator may have slipped in as a hidden cost of giving us an account?
I know I am guilty of this.
No doubt I am far from alone.
The legal bits are long and arduous to digest and sometimes deliberately so.
When you scan terms and conditions and find they run to 50 clauses, or print them and they spill on to a fourth sheet or spot that they are riddled with dry and inaccessible clauses like ‘wherein the first party warrants’, your heart sinks. Now, it seems, help is on the way.
A relatively new website, https://www.tosdr.org/ is one we should all bookmark.
It is a not-for-profit initiative to debunk lengthy legals and condense them into a few key headlines highlighting the good, the bad and the ugly that is otherwise hidden away in the jargon.
It currently carries terms of service summaries for about 70 commonly used sites and apps and is working on grading them from Class A (good, low risk, your privacy is protected) to Class E (approach with great caution).
Only 11 have been classified as yet but some will be surprised to see the popular YouTube and TwitPic both classified as Class D.
In both cases this results from terms which severely erode users’ rights over content that they have posted.
In each case, tosdr.org gives a five bullet point summary of the issues and a link to more details, which display the exact wordings that give rise to concern.
