Facebook’sbasic terms of service have more than 4,200 words, and Twitter’s basic terms of service have more than 3,000 words. It would take you days to go through them if you REALLY want to understandwhat these companies stipulate when you agree to use their products.
Pages-long terms of service agreements have been a pain in the neck for ages, buta new bill introduced in the UScould be our savior. The Terms-of-service Labeling, Design and Readability (TLDR) Act, introduced by a bipartisan trio of Senators Bill Cassidy and Ben Ray Luján, and Congresswoman Lori Trahan, aims to shorten ToS documents, so they’re as easy to read as nutrition labels on packaged food.
Oh, and you’ve gotta give them props for the acronym, which is also the same one for the now-common phraseToo Long; Didn’t Read.
So how does the new bill aim to make ToS simple? Companies will have to provide the following information in a simple and skimmable format:
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If companies fail to follow these standards, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) could fine them. Plus,State Attorneys General could file a civil action lawsuit if 1,000 or more residents of the state have been affected.
What’s in it for users?
The press release of the bill quoted a 2012 study noting thatit would take the average American 76 days to read service agreements of the tech services they use. No wonder all of us just agree to these terms without reading them
Anotherreport published by The UK Children’s Commissioner in 2017, stated that none of the 12-15 year old kids surveyed at that time understood Instagram’s ToS.
The same year, researchers createda dummy website that included terms that statedusers’ first-born children would be owned by the company.Many agreed to that without looking, but you can’t really blame them.
The terms of service are useful to companies in legal battles with their customers. For example, if you complainabout a social network is using photos you uploaded on the platform in their ads, the firm is likely to point at the lengthy document where you signed on the dotted line, and get away with it.
Technically, the legal agreement tells us what the company is liable for and what it’s not. But practically, you can’t read pages and pages of stuff written in legal language and understand it in one go. Plus, when you just want to post about your lunch or make a video, going through all this seems like a hassle.
The TLDR bill wants to turn these giant documents into a one-pager to make us understandhow your data is used, and what rights you have while using a service.It should help keep companies from snatching away your first-born.
There are already websites such asTOSDRandTLDR Legalthat make it easy for us toread legal agreements of top sites on the internet. But the bill could force every techcompanyto follow a particular format.
What are the problems with the TLDR bill?
This sounds great on paper, but the execution might be hard. Former Microsoft executiveSteven Sinofskypointed out that most contractual language is the result of age-old wording, so that might take a lot of effort to change.Plus, in a case of a breach of the agreement (such as the alleged misuse of private data), the TLDR could count as misleading while the detailed TOS might be more explicit and worth referring to in a legal context.
PS/ Also new required disclosures also make the whole ToS longer. Good stuff to disclose but more words.
Finally, much of the length of ToS comes from contractual wording. Abbreviated language, colloquial lang, make the terms more difficult to litigate. Decades of precedence.
— Steven Sinofsky (@stevesi)January 14, 2022
AsGizmodopointed out, it’s not clear if this bill tacklesprivacy policies and other data management-related documents. So even if the ToS are summarized, you might still have to go through a ton of documentation written in legalese.
While the new bill forms an outline for summarized ToS, if it doesn’t formalize a format, it could be difficult to parse even one-pagers for a lot of users. So we could be back to square one.
All theseissues aside, the TLDR bill is a step forward towards better transparency in tech — and a better experience for end-users like you and me.
Story byIvan Mehta
Ivan covers Big Tech, India, policy, AI, security, platforms, and apps for TNW. That’s one heck of a mixed bag. He likes to say “Bleh.“Ivan covers Big Tech, India, policy, AI, security, platforms, and apps for TNW. That’s one heck of a mixed bag. He likes to say “Bleh.”
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