Hacker News Reader

Comment by HumblyTossed | Hacker News Reader

> Any ideas how we, the users of the internet, should act to prevent those steps?

Don't use services with ToS you don't agree with.

What about when someone else buys a company and changes the ToS, taking possession of work we've already contributed under a different ToS that you were okay with?

Assign no loyalty to any company that forces you into a TOS.

Understand that nothing is more sacred than the Holy Dollar to an entity whose only purpose is to extract money from its customers.

Always assume you'll be betrayed by corporations and store your possessions (data in this case) accordingly.

Diversify your interests and hobbies such that a betrayal by a corporation doesn't significantly impact your life.

At this point, trusting corporations without putting any mitigations in place seems like begging desperately for trouble.

Clearly you should live under a rock if you don't want anyone to cross their fingers behind their backs or take advantage of the fact that you didn't say "no backsies".

That helps, but individual boycotts/market actions can't easily overcome the momentum of preferential attachment because brands are not fungible. Market evangelists/absolutists often rely on naive models of supply and demand, but forget that those models only work under conditions of perfect competition. This means ignoring the many many factors that contribute to inelastic demand like the cost of switching, the lack of ToS clarity, sunk costs, and prior network effects. There are plenty of people who hate Twitter but can't disengage from it because that's where most of their clicks are coming from.

Bad take when the ToS can change on a dime and companies don't give a hoot about retroactive respect.

The problem with TOS changes is they never provide a diff. They provide the entire TOS again, one that most people already skipped. I don’t think it’s fair to even provide a legal TOS that does not match your demographic.

These things need to be shorter and written at a 8th grade writing level, and I don’t mean that in any pejorative way. It needs to be clear to the average person (and I’m not even sure if I’m being generous there by suggesting 8th grade writing/reading level).

More importantly, I think official organisations like government, local government, safety, charities etc should not be encouraging people to use non-safe channels to interac. We should be lobbying them to stop

We need legislation that forces companies to prompt users with a ToS that’s no longer than 400 characters.

The prompt should read “So, you cool with that brah?”, and the word “Accept” needs to be replaced with “Yeah sure why not”, and “No” with “Nah, no thank you”.

Current TOS’s don’t provide enough clarity.

That way any semantic issues down the line can be boiled down to “brah, users said they were cool with it” (to the judge).

Yea that's the first step... but I think that as a group of users we can do much more and build a better internet.

This is like Cold-war between companies, that we as users are the cannon fodder...

Unfortunately that is basically all of them.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com