Bonum Certa Men Certa

Terms of Service (TOS) Under Scrutiny - Part III - Terms-of-service Labeling, Design, and Readability Act

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Aug 25, 2024

LAST night we wrote about "Forced Arbitration in TOS" and put forth an example. It turns out there's a very recent and good example of this.

Terminator hand: Show me the term

"Regarding the post on forced arbitration," a reader said, see "Disney Seeking Dismissal of Death Lawsuit Because Victim Was Disney+ Subscriber" and "After Massive Public Outcry, Disney Stops Attempt to Kill Lawsuit After Death of Restaurant Guest".

We're going to give some more examples of this much later in the series.

First we'll go through a long list of separate issues, not examples.

Today we touch "too long, didn't read" or "Terms-of-service Labeling, Design, and Readability" (TLDR), which a recent presentation outlined as follows:

TLDR

TLDR an Act to make Terms of Service simpler

TLDR Terms-of-service Labeling, Design, and Readability Act

TLDR an Act to make Terms of Service simpler

This bill aims to make Terms of Service more simple, quick to read. A link to the bill is found at the Congress website below:

https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/senate-bill/3501

Why is this important? As presented at 2600 HOPE, terms of service can really take time to read through especially with privacy agreements attached as part of the Terms of Service or Terms and Conditions.

In the privacy agreement or policy, there are many additional areas as follows:

- Ownership

- Sale and sharing of data collected

- What is collected

- Data retention period

- Training AI (for marketing)

- Other areas about your information and how it is used

The case in point discussed was Zoom. This was a beast of a Terms of Service. Now, imagine you need to use Zoom per the requirements of a job interview. You need to keep the lights on. The first interview is a half hour session. So, you go to install the app just before the meeting and the ToS with privacy agreement will take at least (average) an hour and half to read. This coercive agreement collects all sort of information for you and if you host meetings, your invitees.

I don’t see how this type of software agreement can be enforced as the length of the TOS, accompanying docs and type of application, users could seriously argue, considering the platform, the inability to review the TOS in a timely manner.

(that is my opinion and IANAL and do not know of any such cases, but an argument could be made....)

Zoom will be looked upon at greater depth later, including some of the dodgy parts of the TOS.

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