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I get to have this experience with one of my banks. And all I need to do to stay updated with the terms is click watch on the github repo. It's the way things should be.

https://github.com/SimpleFinance/policies

Simple looks incredible. Is it as great as it looks?

It depends. I tried to switch to Simple, but at the time I was working as an independent contractor. The maximum size of a check you can deposit without mailing it to them is $3k. Having to mail in every check I received was a hassle that outweighed any benefits Simple provided over a regular bank account.

For what it's worth, last time I was doing independent contractor work, I used a billing firm, MBO Partners. They took 4% of my gross and treated me as a W2 employee. My taxes would come out of the gross, as would any benefits I elected. The rest would get direct deposited like a normal paycheck. I would have spent more than 4% of my time screwing around with paperwork, so I thought it a pretty good deal. I suspect there are other firms like this, but I liked 'em enough that I used them for 8 years or so without ever looking for alternatives.

Simple is terrific. I've been using it for about a year and 1/2. If you are already used to paying all your bills online, then this is right for you.

Exactly what I want to be doing all day: watching my bank's github repo and trying to keep up with their ever changing policies.

Edit: Mentally tracking and integrating policy reversions[0] sounds like a good time as well.

[0] https://github.com/SimpleFinance/policies/commit/b0a644035fb...

What if arbitration clauses are not a problem at all? There is a great deal of contradictory evidence with respect to whether arbitration is more or less favorable to consumers and employees (though it is definitely very bad for class-action lawyers). But even if we assume for the purpose of argument that consumers always lose disputes which are arbitrated, they may be willing to make that trade in exchange for reduced prices on goods and services, as well as higher salaries.

I was a class action lawyer for several years.

There is a great deal of definitive evidence that arbitration clauses undermine the purposes of class proceedings, those purposes being:

1. increased access to justice (i.e. one may be automatically included in a successful claim, as opposed to seeking prospective reward through a potentially lengthy and expensive adjudication);

2. lowering of overall cost of adjudication (i.e. many issues may be resolved at once, at lower expense to the plaintiffs, defendant, and the courts); and

3. behavioural correction (i.e. raise the likelihood of bad behaviour by corporations resulting in monetary consequence).

Contracting-away class procedural rights can undermine point #1 and #3. Most people do not litigate even when they have an excellent chance of success, and behavioural correction requires a certain percentage of individuals to bring and succeed in their cases. The percentage who tend to litigate, and whom can be confidentially settled with out of court, are empirically a fraction the aggregate exposure from a class proceeding.

Which is all to say, arbitration clauses are not a problem if you do not feel like corporations should have monetary consequence for bad behaviour. This is certainly good for the people who own the corporations.

There is a problem, whether perceived or real, of "lottery ticket litigation" where plaintiff class action lawyers receive a large payout on success. Certainly one wants to incentivize capable lawyers to take on hard and speculative projects by dangling good returns, but in the case of class actions I have always thought of it more as a public interest litigation. There should be an incentive to succeed, but properly employed class proceedings can have a substantial public benefit. Lottery litigation can attract the wrong lawyers, though in my experience there is a fairly wide spectrum. On the other hand, public service class proceedings have their own set of distinct issues.

>> behavioural correction requires a certain percentage of individuals to bring and succeed in their cases

No it doesn't. Both the extensive use of the class form and punitive damages (or close substitutes) are virtually unique to the United States. Ad hoc regulation by an entrepreneurial plaintiff's bar acting without meaningful client input is not the not the only effective means to regulate businesses. On the contrary, plenty of countries arguably do a better job without the use of them at all.

The US is also uniquely suited to business innovation. I think that's no coincidence. Depending upon after-the-fact class action instead of up-front regulation means more focus on actual harm than fear of harm.

I also broadly wouldn't trust the US to be particularly good at government regulation until our elections are publicly funded. There's a lot of evidence that our legislation is distorted towards the interests of the moneyed. I don't think that's a recipe for energetic, effective business regulation.

> >> behavioural correction requires a certain percentage of individuals to bring and succeed in their cases

> No it doesn't.

It is necessary for class proceedings to induce behavioural modification, which is what we are talking about here. There are other means to bring about behavioural correction, but that was beyond the scope of my comments.

> Both the extensive use of the class form and punitive damages (or close substitutes) are virtually unique to the United States.

At least a dozen states have class procedures, but you may be right on punitive damages. Canada is quite close, but punitive measures are handed out sparingly.

>> Ad hoc regulation by an entrepreneurial plaintiff's bar acting without meaningful client input is not the not the only effective means to regulate businesses.

I partially agree; class proceedings are a poor substitute for regulation. However, a few points. First, in tandem with victim compensation and reduced litigation costs, some argue the behavioural modification aspect from financial consequence can act as a check-and-balance that requires no arbitrary intervention by the government to correct and prevent wrongdoing.

Second, class action are procedural in nature and the substance of the case must be founded on existing laws – often common law torts, but sometimes regulatory or administrative. The cost of enforcement via a class proceeding is relieved from the public purse, and no additional rights are conferred on victims by way of a class proceeding – only the vehicle for exercising those rights is modified.

Third, regulators are often not as aligned with victims as plaintiff lawyers in class proceedings. It is not unheard of, and in some places quite common, for regulators to be hired by the very institutions they are charged with regulating.

Moreover, one can gauge the effectiveness of the class proceeding in behavioural modification by observing the broad resistance to it, namely the widespread introduction of arbitration clauses. Perhaps not the behaviour it was intended to modify, but that itself speaks to the point.

> On the contrary, plenty of countries arguably do a better job without the use of them at all.

I tend to agree, depending on the circumstances, but it is a hotly contested point.

How do those other countries do it?

Public sector regulators drawing a salary and answerable (at least in theory) to democratically elected bosses and ultimately the people.

From what I've seen, the US already has pretty aggressive public sector regulation in most areas, more than we seem to have over here in the UK these days. It's still not a complete solution because regulators don't have the resources to be everywhere at once.

They are a problem now. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. This is a one sided contract. Can you ever envision a contract solely drafted by one side to be beneficial to both sides?

The only contradictory 'evidence' is talk about why it's better; that is, companies claim it's an easier and cheaper process. They fail to mention that what they mean is, it's easier and cheaper to them.

As a consumer, I want the laws to be written by my elected politician, don't you? Sure, there's a lot of unfairness to it. But I can't imagine a selfish corporation, one that keeps claiming their only loyalty is the the share holder, will do much better.

Just one example. You know VWs recent emission scandal? In the USA those people signed not only an arbitration agreement, but one that disallows class actions. You won't hear the problems that arbitration is causing because those problems won't make it to a court of law to be a problem.

Mandatory arbitration is great for you - that why I'm insisting it's in the contact!

Honestly!

That's a good point. One could just argue that in time consumers will just favor contracts with companies that either don't have arbitration clauses or if they do the consumer doesn't care anyway about losing potential disputes. I think it's only really a problem when a company holds a (quasi) monopoly in a certain business. Like telcos do in the US in many states.

One could argue that. But markets are mainly good at solving problems that occur frequently and with short feedback loops. The sort of problems that lead to class action lawsuits are rarely either, let alone both.

You're assuming there will be a choice. A successful strategy tends to be copied. I doubt that any of the companies forcing you to agree to an arbitration clause have competitors that don't.

Well, no, society can no accept that people wave their basic rights away on a contract, even if those people think it's a good deal.

Slavery waits on the end of this route.

Shady landlords try this all the time.

In New York (and, for all I know, everywhere else -- IANAL), city laws prevent you from signing away certain rights in a lease because shady landlords kept sneaking waivers in. For example, you can legally withhold rent if your landlord does not keep your property in a livable state. Many leases have provisions specifically waiving your right to withhold rent, but such provisions are legally enforceable.

There could be a similar law preventing anyone from signing away rights we deem too important to jeopardize.

Did you mean "legally unenforceable"?

Yup.

Imagine if such a lease was enforceable (its not) - it would render all landlord tenant laws null and void!

They should just tell companies if they cannot describe the legal situation in under a page in a clear language for general consumer products then they cannot sell them.

Diffs won't help - the aim from version 1.0 is to obfuscate.

1 page is plenty long to bury unconscionable landmines in, especially for the party controlling UX. Until courts are ready to legislate UX, the better approach is to legislatively augment the court's "soft" power to void contracts that a reasonable person would "sign" without reading. Vague as hell, yes, but it fixes the incentive landscape without leaving obvious loopholes: longer and harder to read = more enforcement risk.

Also, this principle already exists and has a decent track record. Which is why my lease is 3 pages long, simple, and relatively landmine-free (I had to initial key clauses) while my iTunes contract is 50 page long, impenetrable, and landmine rich. The principle just needs to be strengthened & applied in the tech world.

Eh, the "vague as hell" is a huge problem. If I'm reading a contract trying to figure out my recourse and it has a bunch of unconscionable terms, then I've got to confidently know enough general legal information and applicable case law to realize what's on the paper in front of me is utter bullshit. Most likely I am going to be dissuaded from escalating (lawyer or small claims) thinking I simply have no case. Perhaps if there were punitive damages for unconscionable terms (which seems appropriate as they're essentially maliciously wrong legal advice).

I'd agree, but I'm also pretty sure that it'll be a long and trying uphill battle requiring decades of waiting and several large scandals just to get the judiciary to the point of throwing them out. But I guess we can hope :)

It's simply a symptom of the wider problem that is a scourge of all our lives:

- states are on the side of corporations not the people

The farmer has never been "on the side" of the pigs and cattle. In precise analogy, the state has never been "on the side" of the people.

Wow, not many history buffs here on HN. Lots of credulous junior-high civics students, though.

It's a bit more that the "the state is the enemy" line rapidly devolves to standard Libertarian bullshit.

Power begets power. Good power structures redirect that concentration and redistribute power, wealth, and means of production. The question of how to go about doing this is older than civilisation, most recent example I've come up with is from a history of Caesar Augustus, addressing the optimates and populares.

Former are oligarches, latter proles.

Guess which side's plank was "strict property rights and no debt forgivenss", and which was "structured bankruptcies, land redistribution, and affordable grain"?

It's the same strict propertarian vs. living-wage argument we're having today.

We didn't solve this type of thing for the adversarial case. If contracts became easily electronically diffable, then companies who didn't want their diffs comprehensible would randomly move sentences around and substitute words in every version of their contracts.

Perhaps one could legislate that legally immaterial changes have to be kept in separate commits than legally material changes, and that those have to be as atomic as is reasonable.

I feel like the more difficult problem is getting every company to use some kind of electronic system to store versions of legal documents. Actually diffing two documents in any format is much simpler, even against an adversarial company.

I have to imagine that the companies would at least be paying more for lawyers to shuffle contracts around like that than to amend them slightly.

It's an interesting idea, but I don't think it would accomplish anything. A major point of the article is that consumers and employees generally have no power to negotiate; even if you can read the contract easily, there's little you can do about it.

The only way to bring about that kind of change is from the regulatory level, the companies benefit from obfuscating the changes they're making you agree to. Making it easier to see that they just added a single provision allowing them to sell your data is not something companies will want to implement themselves.

I am a deals attorney and a programmer. I'd caution against conflating comparison tools like "diff" with Git and revision control more generally.

Lawyers call change sets "redlines" rather than "diffs". Their use in the profession long predates modern computing. Word has a serviceable built-in diff tool called "Compare Documents", and many law firms license superior document comparison software. Prose diff is hard, and specialized law tools far surpass diff, wdiff, GitHub prose diff, &c. in areas like move detection and treatment of punctuation.

Source code revision control systems are built for, and conducive to, modes of collaboration that only occasionally resemble legal practice. In the main, lawyers trade "patches" with commentary via e-mail, which is still the practice of some important open-source projects, like Git itself. (For a nice comparison of this workflow to "GitHub flow": http://zachholman.com/posts/git-commit-history/ . See also git-send-email and git-format-patch.) A developer might be tempted to squash commits to make a "pretty" patch. In an adversarial negotiation, hiding incremental revision history is essential for maintaining confidentiality and information advantage. If you're going to squash, anonymize, remove timestamps, &c. every time, Git is overhead and potentially dangerous. Git's architecture does not allow parallel, private histories for shared commits; you can't have your secrets and share them, too.

Fortunately, there are two common situations where Git makes sense for legal docs: standard forms and public terms. GitHub is in active use in both those areas.

A few pioneers, among them Jason Boehmig, whose Ironclad is a recent YC alum, and Casey Kuhlman, now of Eris Industries, have done work on "open" form contracts in plaintext markup tracked with Git. Jason lead the effort to make the Series Seed financing documents available on GitHub: https://github.com/seriesseed/equity I've followed in Jason's footsteps with an in-development community revision of Series Seed at https://github.com/seriesnext/seriesnext and an experimental company-to-company NDA at https://github.com/obviousnda/obviousnda (More announcements in this vein to come.) Casey's "Legal Markdown" and later writing for Eris were big inspiration for my current open-source work.

Public terms, like terms of use, fall somewhere in between working on a standard form for the common good and negotiating a contentious agreement. On the one hand, what's good for the service provider may come at user expense, as with arbitration clauses or limits on liability. On the other hand, courts require that users at least have notice and a way to review changes made, and transparency goes a long way to earning user trust and avoiding PR blow-up.

When the users on the other side are devs, Git makes a lot of sense. A number of developer-tools companies use version control to track their privacy policies, and sometimes other company policies. npm, Inc.'s policies, to give one example, are here: https://github.com/npm/policies Many of these use GitHub's "prose diff" support for Markdown.

If you're interested in terms of use, privacy policies, and the like, I've written about how my open-source work on "Common Form" (https://commonform.github.io), a schema and content-addressing system for modular legal documents, will apply to those terms: http://writing.kemitchell.com/2015/08/24/TOS-Already-Read.ht...

Why doesn't somebody just create a git repository with contracts from major companies and push changes whenever they appear? Link to a subreddit that discusses said changes and voilà you get a little more transparency. Or am I missing something?

Contracts are probably subject to copyright, which means the DMCA could shut down such a repo.

A fair use claim should defend it. Understanding a contract is necessary for complying with it.

Yeah, the "diff" is a big one. There should be 5-10 major types of contracts that companies can work from, and consumers should be told "This is contract 5. The diff is as follows:" and limit the diff in length

Some states have this. In Texas for example there is a statewide standard residential lease contract. When you rent property in Texas you know what you're getting into.

Ive been trying to think of an effective way of regulating these sorts of contacts through legislation, and what you're describing seems like the simplest route. Simply have the public draft the standard contractual templates on behalf of consumers/employees/tenants that companies/employers/landlords are constrained to use.

Unless there's any reason to think the corps would have any less influence on that than they have on the laws that allow them to get people to waive their rights to sue - and why would they? - that sounds like a great way to prevent customers from escaping abusive conditions.

As a good example, the aforementioned Texas agreement seems to have a clause that states that the landlord can enter the property at any time without previous notice. Preventing the landlord from giving up that right is not a good thing.

Good point. I'm not even really one to turn to legislative remedies. It's difficult to imagine many practical ways to match the vast legal resources of these established interests against individuals.

And some sort of annotation/comment system for contracts, a la Rap Genius.

And then abusive companies can just make a near unreadable diff. Rearrange all the sections in the document so that the diff is massive and unreadable.

That's a trivial challenge for a computer to solve.

Or we could just regulate sane minimums and then not have to worry about it at all.