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Comment by vasilipupkin | Hacker News Reader

I disagree completely, honestly. If you are signing up for a service like Facebook and they are asking you to click a bunch of boxes, it's not unrealistic to expect you to

a) either understand what you are clicking on or b) just refuse to click on it

what is unrealistic is to expect society to babysit you every single time a moderately complex choice is presented to you.

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If you were to actually sit and read those agreements for everything you use, more than half of all productive time for humanity would be reading licensing agreements. You can refuse to click on these things,but these companies continue to try to insert themselves into more and more of society until we get to the point that you can either chose to spend all day confirming companies aren't taking advantage of you, or checking out of society.

This is a tragedy of the commons that government regulation has been the best solution for so far

But surely all the evidence suggests that it is unrealistic, given that reality shows us over and over that people don't read these boxes before checking?

Do you read the entirety of every twenty page EULA before using a new app?

Actually, I do(almost always). But, that leads to it's own set of issues. My banking session timed out before I finished reading it. Another service I've been using for over 10 years just added new legal that I don't agree to... now what? That service has a network effect... so, I have to leave? drat! Truth is, most online services ask for more than I am willing to concede. That is an issue.

Not to mention the services that alter their TOS and "notify" you by updating a web page. No email, no summary of changes, just a quiet update to a 20 page document that you automatically agree to by continuing to log in.

All sensible choices last only till antagnositc action occurs.

In the case of legal documents -

1) the base scenario itself is terrible - attempts to make credit card terms easier to read have resulted in a huge increase in the amount of text required to read it.

2) leaving the base case aside - the moment a company or individual decides that they can get away with preying on customers, sensible options no longer work- no normal person is going to beat the legal team.

Your position is a theoretically sound position but it does not survive contact with very common real world scenarios.

you have to evaluate this position in the context of comparing it to the alternatives. Do you propose government regulating every moderately complex activity because people can't understand it? First of all, people are smarter than you give them credit for and secondly, Soviet Union tried this. It just doesn't work.

The Soviet Union didn’t live in the modern era - and the country which is comparable today is China - and they’re doing very well. I’ve heard many credible claims that the Chinese state will fail, but it hasn’t till date.

So that point may need to be re-thought.

Doing what very well? You are making too handwavy of a statement. they are regulating some things they care about very heavily and others not at all. And very well is all relative. China is a poor country still, comparing it to US is not reasonable at this stage

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