Privacy policies, TOSs, and other legal agreements no one reads

[missroserose]

Some years ago, I remember seeing a poll on Ars Technica that made me laugh. The 'question' was "I read End User License Agreements..." and the answers were along the lines of "with my attorney", "very carefully", "as a quick skim", and "I accept". Two guesses which was the most popular option by a landslide.

As the daughter of a contract attorney, EULAs (and Terms of Service agreements, and Privacy Policies, and all their ilk) always cause a bit of cognitive dissonance. I know that you should never, ever enter into a binding agreement without reading the terms of it thoroughly. Most people grew up hearing cautionary tales about wolves and disobedient children; I was raised on such tales of eager young artists/entrepreneurs falling for the shady corporation's spiel about how they just needed to sign here and everything would be taken care of.

Given the increasing litigiousness of our society, however, such contracts are popping up every damn where. Wheaton's Law isn't specific enough; any company worth its salt (no matter how small) will have some kind of written policy that they can point to in case someone gets pissy and decides to sue. And for the most part, these are fairly benign legal boilerplate - don't be an ass, and you'll be fine. Given that most of them are drier than Phoenix in the summer to read, and you're well justified in deciding that life's too short to read legal documents and just clicking "accept".

Unfortunately, certain companies with less integrity have taken advantage of the ubiquity of these documents to slip in some downright shady clauses - I'm thinking specifically of Sony's change to the Playstation Network TOS that prevents you from participating in a class action lawsuit against them, implemented directly after several well-publicized instances of negligence on their part. Because there *are* people who actually get their kicks from reading legal documents, news of these generally circulates sooner or later, but that's not much comfort to the people who've agreed to legally disadvantageous terms just for the sake of getting past the screen full of text.

I don't really have any solutions to offer, as the simplest and easiest one - everyone follow Wheaton's Law and stop worrying - requires a fundamental shift in human behavior that just isn't happening. But I want to take a moment and recognize an application I recently started using: Yarny, a creative-writing-oriented word-processing application that looks to me like it may have quite a bit of potential. Niftiness of the concept aside, I was especially impressed that both their Terms of Service and Privacy Policy included a "here's the gist" above the actual legal boilerplate. This struck me as particularly courteous and user-friendly. Admittedly, even if it catches on it's not going to stop companies like Sony from slipping shady clauses into the part few people read, but I absolutely appreciate the attitude towards their users that such an inclusion implies.

Comments

[errant-variable.livejournal.com]

The idea of a tl;dr heading a EULA is in itself somewhat scary. If they clash, which takes precedence? I'm guessing the "clarification" even if there is a direct conflict between the two. While I applaud small companies trying to communicate the spirit of the EULA, if I saw something like that from a major Force of Evil (tm) I would probably read it in detail because that seems almost too likely to be a bait-and-switch.

My biggest problem with EULAs - all of them - are that almost all major software retailers have a "no return on open software" clause. If you don't like it, you get to (try to) return it. If you're lucky, it's going to be Windows, and the retailer usually will accept the whole computer back...

Can't we all just get along?

[epi-lj.livejournal.com]

One of the big problems with EULAs is that there's this illusion that you have the option to accept or not accept. I mean, if you're really hardcore and have an infinite supply of disposable income, maybe you do. But taking the example of the Sony PS3/PSN EULA, if you don't accept, depending on your usage patterns, you've pretty much bricked the unit. Now, obviously you have to be privileged to own a PS3 to begin with, but the majority of people who do own PS3s really can't afford to just randomly brick them because a clause in the new EULA makes them feel slightly uncomfortable. Similarly with Apple and their various stores and services. They claim that you can accept or not, but the option to not accept is only really there if you're willing to just toss the money you spent on the device plus any paid content out the window, which most people can't afford to do. :/

[roseneko.livejournal.com]

Good point, and one I meant to bring up but forgot. EULAs are, perhaps, slightly more optional than something like medical care, but when your options are "use this item that you just dropped a good chunk of money on on our terms" or "don't use it at all", that's extremely problematic. And probably ties in with another trend that annoys me, regarding how consumers are being treated like the lessors rather than owners of things they've supposedly bought, but that's another post. :)