Attorneys General in Six States Are Now Investigating Facebook's Data Practices

Making EULAs easier to deal with could be part of privacy legislation or tied to such legislation. The things covered by privacy legislation will generally fall into three groups.

1. Things that you cannot agree to forego or allow,

2. Things that you can agree to forego or allow, but only as part of an actual negotiation, not implicitly by saying you agree to a EULA, and

3. Things that you can agree to forego or allow by indicating agreement to a EULA, such as by clicking an "I agree" link on a EULA screen.

The privacy legislation could say that in order to get such agreement a EULA must list in a separate section all the items it has from #3, explicitly citing the section and name for each item from the privacy law.

The idea behind the explicit cite to the privacy law is to provide a standard term for each item, so you won't get confused by different companies having different names for the same thing.

This wouldn't cover all the things one might find in a EULA, such as liability limitations, choice of law or choice of venue clauses, arbitration clauses, etc., but it would make it a lot easier to quickly check to see what privacy rights you might be giving up if you click through.

While I completely agree, I think there's a more fundamental problem.

Imagine Facebook's T&C said, "We will spy on you in any and all ways we can imagine. We will take every piece of information we can possibly collect about you and use it however we want. You have no rights and if you ever sue us, you agree that we win by default. We have the right to add whatever we want to this agreement, whenever we want with immediate effect." How many people would read it, and decide not to install their software or use their site? For sure some might, but for the most part I think people would mostly just shrug and click next.

Many people don't seem to understand the value of things unless it hits them directly in the wallet.

I wonder if this is simply tied to history, due to the nature of American expansion the Atlantic and Midwestern cities have a longer history of corporations and have more history of tackling large controversial industry (railroads, banks, even baseball!), off the top of my head I can't think of a history defining action vs. a West coast based industry (probably just lack of knowledge on my part), but it seems big tech will be the first.

The US government system can be weird (well I guess they all can be) but the way this plays out, I like it.

I disagree.

Firstly, Facebook is much more dangerous than Equifax. Yeah, Equifax has data on hundreds of millions of US citizens, plus a few million more in other countries. Facebook has all that data plus MORE on some 2 billion people.

Secondly, why can't it be both? :)

our reality seems closer to Brave New World than 1984