HN Reader

Does a good job of showing how completely unparsable ToS are:

https://tosdr.org/en/service/1448 says both:

"You maintain ownership of your data: This service does not claim ownership over user-generated content or materials, and the user * doesn't need to waive any moral rights* by posting owned content."

and

"You waive your moral rights"

Edit: I have no energy for figuring out which of these statements is more true.

Gread idea. Odd first impression.

Wikipedia has 4 thumbs down 1 thumbs up and is grade B. Tor has 0 thumbs down 3 thumbs up and is grade C.

DuckDuckGo has only 1 thumbs down: "Instead of asking directly, this Service will assume your consent merely from your usage." and is grade B, presumably because of this. Startpage is grade A, has no thumbs down, but going on startpage does not prompt me to agree to anything either.

We need browsers where the _user_ can specify their legal terms in the response headers. Let's make this two-sided.

Sweet! One suggestion is to somehow normalize the requirements by company type? Like, for example, PayPal gets a thumbsdown for

> You must provide your identifiable information

but that's reasonable for a company like PayPal?

ToS are highly unfair, because the company has had a group skilled in legalese draft them over enough time as deemed needed, whereas a layman is supposed to understand and base their next decision on something written in a language hardly understood by almost anyone.

For that reason ToS should be illegal unless, at least, written in layman terms.

The twin purposes of ToS are (1) to provide jobs for lawyers and (2) to screw the customers.

If the ToS were understandable, neither of those would be accomplished.

Some sites, like Facebook and YouTube are listed as being able to see your browser history. It doesn’t seem to be related to tracking scripts, so how exactly does that work?

Great idea - although the website is struggling with comment SPAM https://edit.tosdr.org/points/10493

Ok this site lost me at Tor Browser. Why is Tor Browser listed on there as if it's a commercial product/service and rated as 'Grade C' without any supporting evidence? If they don't even know what Tor is then I don't know how qualified they are to weigh in on privacy issues.

I'll save everyone some time. In the year 2025, just assume any for profit corporation is stealing your data and you've waived all your rights as a consumer when you agreed to that ToS unless presented with compelling evidence to the contrary.

I’d love to see Kagi on here

I will forever remember how my parents, who insisted we should be honest in all situations, also taught us to just click the blue button whenever something wants to be installed.

Tangentially related: FreeOutput[1], which summarizes the copyright ownership of AI generated content from various LLM providers.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43517585

Why does Tor Browser get grade C when it only has green thumbs up?

This is more of a solved problem than not these days thanks to LLMs. You can plop an agreement into an LLM chat and ask some questions, which is a lot better than just checking a box because you didn’t have time to read it. I’ve been doing this myself regularly with pretty good results finding things to be concerned about, or not. LLMs hallucinate and aren’t equipped to be attorneys for us, but this is a big improvement over just having to accept everything blindly.

Why Tor is graded C, even though there are no downsides?

Wasn't there some regulation in EU, which forces service owners to make ToS actually readable and understandable?

Wikipedia:

"The service may use tracking pixels, web beacons, browser fingerprinting, and/or device fingerprinting on users."

Seriously? What for? People invest their time to provide free content and as a reward they are getting behavior typical for privacy invasive corpo from California?

The builtin rating is absolutely horseshit, that needs to go. If I want my TL;DR (summary) to contain opinions, I go read the news.

I don't understand how a website telling me that Facebook has a "Grade E" ToS is supposed to help me at all. Just give me a summary, the bullet points -- you don't need to try to assign each into "good/bad", and you certainly don't need to run an "algorithm" to show me if it's good or bad.

Chances are, if it says "sells all your data", I can figure out if I care about that, as a user, with freedom.

Maybe give me what you think (or your algorithm thinks) are the most important/controversial/impactful points, but don't rate them. This is akin to Wikipedia saying "Friday is the worst song ever created, wow it's so bad (thumbs down emoji)".