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Comment by mancerayder | Hacker News Reader

I fully agree with this, there should be laws that enforce TOS length and legibility for those who didn't take the bar exam or had their personal counsel available before clicking I Agree.

Except that the folks who'd write such laws...

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Or create a universal TOS where service creators can just check off various options, in the same way that Creative Commons created a universe copyright licensing agreement.

This is the only reasonable way I can see going forward.

I recall reading once that a person would need a lifetime's worth of time (50 years? 80?) just to read and understand the legal ramifications of the contracts and TOS he or she must agree to in order to use software.

Clicking "I agree" is probably the most obvious and common lie told by humanity today. Something has to change.

I mean terms of service are not that hard to read. Facebook's TOS is only 4k words long. It is not particularly dense or full of legalese. I have written source code comments a tenth that length for a single function. That is not many words to describe the plethora of implications of using their service.

Go ahead and have a glance at it. What would you remove from it that wouldn't cause a significant gap?

Some example clauses:

> For content that is covered by intellectual property rights, like photos and videos (IP content), you specifically give us the following permission, subject to your privacy and application settings: you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook (IP License). This IP License ends when you delete your IP content or your account unless your content has been shared with others, and they have not deleted it.

(They have to put this. If they didn't, they would get sued by someone who shared a video and then was mad that other people could see it.)

> Facebook users provide their real names and information, and we need your help to keep it that way. Here are some commitments you make to us relating to registering and maintaining the security of your account:

> You will not provide any false personal information on Facebook, or create an account for anyone other than yourself without permission.

(Not exactly dense legalese. It is good to ban impersonation, and it is right that they should include such a ban in their terms.)

> We’ll notify you before we make changes to these terms and give you the opportunity to review and comment on the revised terms before continuing to use our Services.

(Seems reasonable to me. Many years ago, people used to complain that the terms changed without notice, so FB committed to not doing that any more.)

I don't know. This whole "terms of service are impossible to read except by a lawyer" meme just doesn't hold water for me.

Great. So far so good. Where was the part where I agreed they could harvest my profile information because a friend filled out a quiz/questionnaire/etc.?

From https://www.facebook.com/terms.php, item 2.3

When you use an application, the application may ask for your permission to access your content and information as well as content and information that others have shared with you. We require applications to respect your privacy, and your agreement with that application will control how the application can use, store, and transfer that content and information. (To learn more about Platform, including how you can control what information other people may share with applications, read our Data Policy and Platform Page.)

You gave access to your friends, who then authorised access to the application.

The whole point is that you cannot meaningfully consent to give out information about your friend since they’d have to consent to that. Even acknowledging they exist and are your friends is already information. To make matters worse, the v1 API would happily hand out information about your friends, such as their likes without _their_ consent. Not your privacy is breached - theirs is. And there’s no way user A can meaningfully consent to have user B’s information exposed.

It was yours to share because it was shared with you.

That's just not how it works. Apps could for example request access to all messages. Let's make that a physical world example: I write you a letter that contains private details. Are you free to share this letter with third parties? The established legal precedent is clearly "no, not at all." Another example: I allow you to peek into my diary. I shared my private thoughts with you. Are you now allowed to go out and trumpet those out in the world? No, not by any standard. So the default assumption is that things shared privately are private, not public. There are cases where a higher good allows to breach that assumption, but "financial gain" has never been accepted as a higher good in such cases.

Failing to honor that assumption is facebooks fault here.

That's just not how it works

Actually, that is how it works. Unless there is an NDA in place between you and I, I can share anything you choose to share with me, especially in the context of a social network where we both agreed to and are bound by the same TOS where we authorized exactly this kind of sharing.

In what jurisdiction? That's not true in the EU (even pre-GDPR), where Facebook also operates.

My heuristic is that if they don't make it clear what jurisdiction they're talking about, they're talking about the US.

My comment is a bit of a passive-aggressive pushback against that :)

Not in GDPR land.

Let's see what the readability of the FB TOS is, using a random Googled analyzer, in this case https://readable.io:

Readability Grade Levels

A grade level (based on the USA education system) is equivalent to the number of years of education a person has had. A score of around 10-12 is roughly the reading level on completion of high school. Text to be read by the general public should aim for a grade level of around 8.

    Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level  12.6
    Gunning Fog Index           13.9
    Coleman-Liau Index          11.8
    SMOG Index                  14.9
    Automated Readability Index 12.4
    Average Grade Level	        13.1

Text Quality:

    Sentences > 30 Syllables  80  53%
    Sentences > 20 Syllables 115  77%
    Words > 4 Syllables       37   1%
    Words > 12 Letters         2   0%
    Passive Voice Count       17   1%
    Adverb Count             116   4%
    Cliché Count               0   0%

There is a setting to globally disable and enable all apps. If you disable it, no apps can see you, even if your friends use the app. Facebook actually has tons of settings - discoverability is a big problem

And they change all the time, often resetting defaults. And without notice. Playing “respect my privacy” whack a mole with a billion dollar company grows old quickly.

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