anyone else sick of pretending they read terms-of-service?

[u/armaniemaar]

i’m toying with an idea for an automated ‘eula buster’—basically something that scans legalese in tiktok-sized increments, flags the shady bits in red, and tells you if you’re about to sign away your firstborn. because let’s be real, we all scroll to the bottom and click “agree” anyway, then pretend we skimmed it.

i know a few volunteer-driven projects (tos;dr, etc.) exist, but they’re not exactly thorough or up-to-the-minute. is there enough interest for a fully automated, constantly updated summarizer? or would big companies just out-lawyer it into oblivion? part of me thinks we deserve a fighting chance before we blindly sign everything over to whoever wrote the smallest fine print.

thoughts? does the idea sound plausible, or do we just accept that we’ll never read terms-of-service until the robot uprising forces us to?

[u/lo________________ol]

TOS;DR as a project already exists, and it's pretty great. Unfortunately there's intense social pressure to be on the invasive sites regardless. That can't really be fixed, outside of legislation, literally making sections of the TOS unenforceable. Like the time a gaming company, as a joke, said they owned your soul. Or the time Uber, not as a joke, said they can basically kill you.

[u/gthing → u/lo________________ol]

I'd like to see 1. Strict and specific privacy protection regulation, 2. Something like a nutrition label for privacy policies that will tell you the gist of common concerns at a glance.

[u/ilikedota5 → u/lo________________ol]

Or the time Uber, not as a joke, said they can basically kill you.

I'm going to guess that it said as a matter of liability you waive everything which isn't unique to Uber.

The fact of the matter though is that universal waivers aren't enforced. The way it goes is that negligence is waivable but not recklessness. Negligence is something like not breaking in time. Recklessness is something like getting drunk and careening down the freeway. They are two different things. The difference is in severity so much so that if someone didn't get hurt from reckless conduct you lucked out and someone is bound to get hurt eventually. Negligence is bad judgement. Recklessness is judgement so bad there are a lot of things you wouldn't trust them with, like a gun or car. Negligence is something you might do on a bad day with a bad judgement call. Recklessness makes you question whether they have the literal brain capacity to make a judgement call let alone a good one. Also, in regards to recklessness, potential criminal charges are not out of the picture.

For example my karate dojo has a waiver written similarly broadly. But let's say the instructor left the class for an hour and told the 12 year old kid to spar the 8 year old kid in the meanwhile with no adult instructors supervising and the 8 year old kid got injured. That waiver ain't covering that much. It would be "void for public policy" reasons. Ie the court isn't dumb and realizes that erasing any legal recourse creates an unfair and perverse incentive.

It's not wrong to be offended by such a broad waiver, but thankfully courts don't enforce it that broadly.

So with Uber, let's say there was a known driver with a long history of criminal or at least criminal adjacent behavior. That is to say at trial, the driver might be found not guilty, but there is enough to take to trial. And then that guy murders you. And your family sues. And it turns out Uber didn't even read the reports or talk to the driver, police, and rider. Yeah Uber ain't going to use that as an excuse. So there is a bottom line somewhere... It's just so low that things usually don't get to that point. Because most people aren't that comically stupid or evil.

[u/Terziaz → u/lo________________ol]

I didn't know about this, thanks for sharing this.

[u/henryhttps]

I think it sounds like an excellent project and something that I'd be interested in working on. Unfortunately, the general public is too lazy to care about any of the existing solutions that you've mentioned, so I doubt it would go anywhere, but either way it sounds really cool.

[u/armaniemaar → u/henryhttps]

let’s talk more over personal chat?

[u/henryhttps → u/armaniemaar]

👍

[u/Terziaz → u/henryhttps]

Very interesting idea. I love it!

[u/gb997]

the courts should ban them as they are now. ban all tiny text legalese nonsense. make the law demand that everything has to be in concise bullet point format in readable text, with word count limits

[u/No_Virus_7704 → u/gb997]

Spot on.

[u/TheeDynamikOne]

I think this is a necessary idea. Try coordinating with some law firms. Too many people are too vulnerable to predatory legal terms.

This project is a major threat to big business, you will have a lot of haters; which should tell you you're on the right path.

[u/teambob]

There used to be tosdr.org but they couldn't really keep up. I have been thinking something like chatGPT would be great to generate summaries, you could even load the TOS, privacy policy etc as session documents or RAGs

[u/ninjaloose]

I second this as I had the same idea, ai scanning through the legalese and giving a more simple rating 1-10 of good to bad then you could drill down into the more sketchy details as required

[u/robot_ankles]

The people who actually care will read the terms. Then click accept anyways because they really want to use the same app all of their friends are using.

The rest of the world will continue to click-thru because they don't care anyways.

There's practically nobody in-between who will take the time to copy/paste/port/install a plug-in or whatever it would take to de-obfuscate the T&Cs.

[u/YT_Brian]

You could train a LLM (Large Language Model) to do that. Use the doc site to pull from and make it highlight certain words to quote back st you while it does a quick explain.

[u/Trick-Variety2496]

I don't pretend that I read them because I don't

[u/gba__]

you're the oak.ai guy again?

[u/B-12Bomber]

I also thought of an idea of the browser automatically sending with the first request to every site a message of my own private agreement that basically says the company agrees to my contract if they answer the request to connect.

[u/ColdInMinnesooota]

Considering the legal system - as it functions today - basically is a tool of capital / power, I'm suprised we even have terms of service frankly. Then again most of these have mandatory arbitration agreements, so -

speaking of "legal" -

One thing that really made me depressed on reddit was how various legal arguments were used incorrectly these past few years, particularly karl popper's paradox of tolerance being totally bastardized / used the wrong way. as in not understanding it - let alone god forbid the "yelling fire in a crowded theater" which was overturned decades - a century? ago.

Then I figured out that it's mostly people abroad with this lack of basic knowledge - (paid shills and the like) which really opened up my eyes to the amount of manipulation on various subreddits, particularly the politics ones. made me feel better about americans and really opened my eyes to various foreign bot farms, of course these people won't have any understanding of this kind of stuff etc.

then again i felt like an idiot for arguing with these people in the first place, and the time wasted - so let this be a lesson to everyone here.

[u/smooth-remark]

Run it through ChatGPT vomits and ask it to point out contradictions to privacy laws relevant to your country.

[u/Weavel-Space-Pirate]

A really cool idea, especially if it would point out the actual shit you should be reading. Especially if it has to do with you actually owning something or if certain purchases can't be refunded, stuff like that.

[u/Adventurous_Bonus917]

the megacorps have huge walls of leagalease instead of anything readable for a reason.while i'm sure that theres a decent amount if demand for an automated ‘eula buster’, i'm also pretty sure the huge companies would try their hardest to lawyer it out of existence.