[HN Gopher] ToS;DR
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ToS;DR
Author : ColinWright
Score : 248 points
Date : 2025-03-31 09:54 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (tosdr.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (tosdr.org)
| serbuvlad wrote:
| Gread idea. Odd first impression.
|
| Wikipedia has 4 thumbs down 1 thumbs up and is grade B. Tor has 0
| thumbs down 3 thumbs up and is grade C.
|
| DuckDuckGo has only 1 thumbs down: "Instead of asking directly,
| this Service will assume your consent merely from your usage."
| and is grade B, presumably because of this. Startpage is grade A,
| has no thumbs down, but going on startpage does not prompt me to
| agree to anything either.
| olivergregory wrote:
| The grades are explained at the bottom of the page.
|
| Regarding Startpage, It's not mandatory to show the cookie
| banner if you don't track. Startpage doesn't track you at all,
| so it's grade A.
|
| Wikipedia has that all the bad things happen to your account
| except for the tracking, but you can still use Wikipedia
| without using an account. I agree that it's a B.
|
| I'm not familiar enough with Tor to answer that grade.
| shadowwwind wrote:
| See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43535046
| danlitt wrote:
| > The grades are explained at the bottom of the page.
|
| Are they? The table at the bottom page doesn't explain
| anything - in particular doesn't give any indication why Tor
| might be ranked below Wikipedia (for instance). How can a
| service with no mentioned negative qualities have a grade C?
| shadowwwind wrote:
| You only need to accept DuckDuckGo's ToS when you sign up for
| privacy pro. What the point means is that they can change the
| ToS and assume consent to the changes when you continue using
| it, instead if prompting again.
|
| Startpage does not have or need a ToS
| Vinnl wrote:
| (For context, shadowwwind is a contributor to tosdr.)
| RecycledEle wrote:
| The twin purposes of ToS are (1) to provide jobs for lawyers and
| (2) to screw the customers.
|
| If the ToS were understandable, neither of those would be
| accomplished.
| jalk wrote:
| And to protect the service provider from lawsuits.
| hackernewsdhsu wrote:
| Name.com just changed their "privacy policy". I leveraged an
| LLM to analyze the differences, and to identify which party
| benefitted from the change.
|
| Surprise, surprise ... The people get 1 change, Name.com getall
| the rest; including making parts of it more ambiguous.
|
| But it was easy to understand using the LLM analysis and it
| took longer to read than generate.
| toasteros wrote:
| If you haven't read it yourself how do you know that the LLM
| is correct?
| tofof wrote:
| > If you haven't read it yourself how do you know...
|
| This vacuous objection can be raised against every single
| piece of information any human has ever learned from
| elsewhere, recursively, back to the dawn of communication,
| regardless of the nature of the third party source of
| information.
|
| Furthermore, LLM hallucination, particularly of reviewed
| documents, is not a problem I experience any longer with
| the models I use. For example, my LLM setup and the query I
| would use would cause the output to include quotes of the
| differences, which makes ctrl+f/f3 to spot check easy.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Those two purposes are one and the same. The biggest reason for
| corporations to hire lawyers is to figure out the exact amount
| of consumer screwing they can legally get away with.
|
| Whenever people come across any "terms" document, they are well
| served by simply ignoring it entirely and assuming it contains
| the following statements:
|
| > you own nothing
|
| > the company owns everything
|
| > you have no rights
|
| > you promise not to try and exercise any right you think you
| have
|
| > if you ever convince yourself that you actually have rights,
| you agree to binding arbitration with the firm we pay
|
| > you cannot do anything the company doesn't like
|
| > the company can do literally anything it wants whether you
| like it or not
|
| > the company is not responsible for anything, ever
|
| > the company makes absolutely no guarantees about literally
| anything
|
| > you agree to indemnify us in all possible circumstances
| cluckindan wrote:
| Some sites, like Facebook and YouTube are listed as being able to
| see your browser history. It doesn't seem to be related to
| tracking scripts, so how exactly does that work?
| TobTobXX wrote:
| When you click on edit, you can see the specific section of the
| ToS: https://edit.tosdr.org/points/11339
|
| Apparently this means that YT can acces the synced browser
| history if you're logged into Chrome.
| ColinEberhardt wrote:
| Great idea - although the website is struggling with comment SPAM
| https://edit.tosdr.org/points/10493
| amichal wrote:
| Does a good job of showing how completely unparsable ToS are:
|
| https://tosdr.org/en/service/1448 says both:
|
| "You maintain ownership of your data: This service does not claim
| ownership over user-generated content or materials, and the user
| * doesn't need to waive any moral rights* by posting owned
| content."
|
| and
|
| "You waive your moral rights"
|
| Edit: I have no energy for figuring out which of these statements
| is more true.
| Y_Y wrote:
| I think in such a case (unless there was some context that
| clearly showed the difference between those two statements)
| then you as a user would benefit from _contra proferentem_.
| This legal principle (which is explicit law in some
| jurisdictions) says that the contract terms should be
| interpreted in favour of the party who did not write them.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contra_proferentem
| actionfromafar wrote:
| Also not a thing possible to do, depending on jurisdiction.
| shadowwwind wrote:
| True. Currently it's practice at ToS;DR to show the worst
| version. Usually the one for the USA
| dimava wrote:
| Both is right I think
|
| It's just one in coming from EU TOS[1] and another comes from
| USA TOS[2]
|
| And the website doesn't support that
|
| [1] https://www.tiktok.com/legal/page/eea/terms-of-service/en
|
| [2] https://www.tiktok.com/legal/page/us/terms-of-service/en
| j_bum wrote:
| I'd love to see Kagi on here
| Vinnl wrote:
| ToS;dr is a collaborative effort! Folks can contribute for Kagi
| at https://edit.tosdr.org/services/11540/.
| basedrum wrote:
| Why does Tor Browser get grade C when it only has green thumbs
| up?
| Vinnl wrote:
| Just checked with the team (I used to be involved), and
| apparently the reason is that Tor's policy is too short for the
| algorithm that turns policy annotations into a grade.
|
| (This also kickstarted a discussion that maybe that warrants a
| change to the algorithm, so maybe later more.)
| garyrob wrote:
| I propose that it should use a Baysian prior where the
| background knowledge is assumed to be an A.
|
| While it may be true that most ToS are onerous, suppose we
| look at a ToS document as a collection of terms of service.
| It's only the terms of service that cause a removal of rights
| that would otherwise be assumed. The more terms there are,
| and the more onerous each one is, the more rights can be
| removed. But before there are any terms, no rights are
| removed, so that situation should be an A. Diminished from
| there, depending on how many terms there are, and each one's
| onerousness.
| woadwarrior01 wrote:
| Tangentially related: FreeOutput[1], which summarizes the
| copyright ownership of AI generated content from various LLM
| providers.
|
| [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43517585
| lionkor wrote:
| The builtin rating is absolutely horseshit, that needs to go. If
| I want my TL;DR (summary) to contain opinions, I go read the
| news.
|
| I don't understand how a website telling me that Facebook has a
| "Grade E" ToS is supposed to help me at all. Just give me a
| summary, the bullet points -- you don't need to try to assign
| each into "good/bad", and you certainly don't need to run an
| "algorithm" to show me if it's good or bad.
|
| Chances are, if it says "sells all your data", I can figure out
| if I care about that, as a user, with freedom.
|
| Maybe give me what you think (or your algorithm thinks) are the
| most important/controversial/impactful points, but don't rate
| them. This is akin to Wikipedia saying "Friday is the worst song
| ever created, wow it's so bad (thumbs down emoji)".
| butz wrote:
| Wasn't there some regulation in EU, which forces service owners
| to make ToS actually readable and understandable?
| Puts wrote:
| GDPR partly covers this since it's stated that the user must
| get information about how personal data is used in a clear and
| easy readable form. But I guess, there's some wiggle room how
| to interpret that. The law actually suggest that the industry
| could come up with symbols - like on food packaging. Your
| website could have a bunch of standardized icons in the footer
| to inform you how data is used, but since we don't have that it
| seems like the industry didn't like that idea of transparency.
| osm3000 wrote:
| Why Tor is graded C, even though there are no downsides?
| Vinnl wrote:
| See the same question down this page:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43534479
| amelius wrote:
| We need browsers where the _user_ can specify their legal terms
| in the response headers. Let's make this two-sided.
| skybrian wrote:
| In a negotiation, either side can walk away. If the website
| can't refuse then it's not really a negotiation. So how would
| that work? If you set certain headers, the website blocks you?
| It doesn't seem like that would be a popular feature.
|
| It would make more sense as filtering criteria for a search
| engine.
| amelius wrote:
| Well, we could have organisations like the EFF compose a set
| of consumer-friendly clauses, which the user can then choose
| from.
|
| If the website wants to block something the EFF deems a good
| and reasonable protection for the user, then maybe they
| should indeed block the request.
| bsimpson wrote:
| I will forever remember how my parents, who insisted we should be
| honest in all situations, also taught us to just click the blue
| button whenever something wants to be installed.
| jameslk wrote:
| This is more of a solved problem than not these days thanks to
| LLMs. You can plop an agreement into an LLM chat and ask some
| questions, which is a lot better than just checking a box because
| you didn't have time to read it. I've been doing this myself
| regularly with pretty good results finding things to be concerned
| about, or not. LLMs hallucinate and aren't equipped to be
| attorneys for us, but this is a big improvement over just having
| to accept everything blindly.
| timcobb wrote:
| Sweet! One suggestion is to somehow normalize the requirements by
| company type? Like, for example, PayPal gets a thumbsdown for
|
| > You must provide your identifiable information
|
| but that's reasonable for a company like PayPal?
| piokoch wrote:
| Wikipedia:
|
| "The service may use tracking pixels, web beacons, browser
| fingerprinting, and/or device fingerprinting on users."
|
| Seriously? What for? People invest their time to provide free
| content and as a reward they are getting behavior typical for
| privacy invasive corpo from California?
| synecdoche wrote:
| ToS are highly unfair, because the company has had a group
| skilled in legalese draft them over enough time as deemed needed,
| whereas a layman is supposed to understand and base their next
| decision on something written in a language hardly understood by
| almost anyone.
|
| For that reason ToS should be illegal unless, at least, written
| in layman terms.
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(page generated 2025-03-31 23:01 UTC)