[forgingahead]

It's all farcical, but it's pervasive because of the lawyers I guess. Even a supposedly design-first-consumer-friendly company like Apple has walls of tiny text to scroll through.

If only Terms of Services could be upgraded to:

1. A simple, plain English/local language explanation in bullet points of what the software will be doing. Like how you would explain it to your parents.

2. A link to the legalese, so that covers the legal requirements?

If I recall correctly, Stripe is one company whereby the Terms of Service tries to explain things to you clearly. That's certainly a start, but this would be an interesting thing to improve on and solve. Maybe a GPT-2/GPT-3 application? Tell me simply what this block of text means?

[josefx]

> Even a supposedly design-first-consumer-friendly company like Apple

The company that actively misled consumers about the EU wide minimum two year warranty, sold it separately as extended warranty and finally placed the court mandated correction on its home page just a bit out of sight.

If so called "consumer friendly" companies had to write a honest guide to social interactions it would start of with a chapter on the benefits of rape and pillaging.

[PaulKeeble]

The problem is the entire point is to hide all the nefarious things they can do with your data. Plenty of open source software has really straight forward agreements based on common terms but they can do that because they aren't working out scary ways to utilise your data to make money from you.

[lcall]

Yes, like we do with Creative Commons or FLOSS licenses, so you don't have any reason to read them more than once or occasionally. Whether somebody. Maybe something like the uniform commercial code, in the USA. That would be a nice contribution by some organization.

Even if only some sections are standardized and others not, that would be a comparative win. Maybe an "exceptions/additions" part.

Edit: also, there are some few sites I recall that summarized terms and/or pointed out problematic parts, to help someone who cared but didn't want to read them all. I might be able to hunt up (a) link(s) if desired.

What I do currently is read them once, mentally note the date displayed, save them, and when they change, use a short script to make it easy to see differences (uses fmt to make lines to shorter first, and get sometimes fewer differences that way). Sometimes I have pushed back and contacted the organization, or just not used them. I wrote a bunch of complaints about this kind of thing, at my site -- it takes us further down the slippery slope of saying things we don't mean to each other, habitually, which is sadly dishonest IMO.

[lcall]

For reference in case useful, though I haven't even read their site carefully: https://stonecutters.law/

They say "Stonecutters publishes legal forms and clauses for other legal craftsmen to incorporate by reference."