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Posted by ColinWright 3/31/2025

ToS;DR(tosdr.org)
298 points | 42 commentspage 2
bsimpson 3/31/2025|
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.
sieabahlpark 3/31/2025|
[dead]
basedrum 3/31/2025||
Why does Tor Browser get grade C when it only has green thumbs up?
Vinnl 3/31/2025|
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 3/31/2025||
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 3/31/2025||
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

butz 3/31/2025||
Wasn't there some regulation in EU, which forces service owners to make ToS actually readable and understandable?
Puts 3/31/2025|
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 3/31/2025||
Why Tor is graded C, even though there are no downsides?
Vinnl 3/31/2025|
See the same question down this page: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43534479
jameslk 3/31/2025||
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.
piokoch 3/31/2025||
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?

lionkor 3/31/2025|
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)".