[Wowfunhappy]

My take is that if one party to a contract does not have a reasonable expectation that the contract was read by the other party, the contract should be invalid.

People need to know what they’re signing. Imagine if a celebrity was signing a bunch of autographs for fans, and someone surreptitiously stuck a contract under their hand. We can agree that wouldn’t be valid, right?

[johannes1234321]

You deliberately chose not to read it. Why should you then be allowed to use the service AND claim not being bound by the terms?

(And yes, I think german law has the right principle there: clauses which are "unexpected" to an average consumer are invalid with consumers (different in B2B context), thus risk as consumer is low when blindly accepting)

[WindyLakeReturn]

>Why should you then be allowed to use the service AND claim not being bound by the terms?

It is like a child signing a contract. The child isn't bound to it, but the other party is. In this case, a corporation attempted to use an extreme disparity in knowledge and power to take advantage of a much weaker party. The disparity is larger than that between an average adult and an average child. As a consequence of this, it seems just as fair as in the case of contracts signed by children.

[bigwavedave]

>It's like a child signing a contract.

I don't know if I'd go that far. There's a whole class of laws around protecting children (two quick examples here in the US: age of consent; being tried as a minor vs tried as an adult) because the reality is that, in general, children are easier than adults to exploit. I mean, I convinced my nephew over the holiday that eating all his broccoli was like doing extra credit for Santa Claus, so it would cancel out the naughty action of eating one of the cookies he put out for Santa.

Saying that an adult agreeing to an unread ToS is unenforceable because we don't hold children accountable for signed contracts is plain nonsense.

[WindyLakeReturn]

Our current law makes a sharp divide between children and adults, but I think when you ignore the current law and instead look at the reasoning and the data we have, the comparison is pretty sound. The gap in knowledge and domain specific reasoning ability between the average child and adult is smaller than the gap between the average adult and a corporate team of lawyers. While I think that is already a sign the issue needs to be considered, we have corporations exploiting this knowledge gap to their advantage. There are also many countries have recognized this as a problem and have developed different attempted solutions, such as creating limits on what sort of contracts can be enforced.

So I do not see how the overall idea can be dismissed as nonsense.

[bigwavedave]

That's fair, I'll concede that.

[johannes1234321]

The Child is assumed to be unable to sign a legal contract.

You are able and chose not to. (Unless maybe you have a mental disability and then some caretaker)

[gorgoiler]

Serious contracts are witnessed or, better, notarised. These witnesses attest to the good faith involved in the signing ceremony.

Accept button clicking is not witnessed. Any contract so-signed should be good for all of $10 worth of dispute. No more.

[colejohnson66]

Assuming that became a law: I now need to get witnesses to me checking a box to use some software? What’s to stop me from just being my own witness under a fake name? I get the explosion of TOS contracts are stupid and need to be fixed, but we can’t just be crazy with fixing it.</rant>

[Wowfunhappy]

Why should you need to sign a TOS in order to use some consumer software? No, what would happen is TOS's would go away for everything but high-level professional software.

[colejohnson66]

Websites with accounts all have TOS because they need some legal recourse to boot you from their platform. The TOS lays out what you are allowed to do on the site (in addition to other things). That’s not changing no matter what you (or I) wish would happen without a massive change in how the legal system works in America.

[Wowfunhappy]

I just don’t think this is a real problem. Restaurants and theaters can kick me out be being disruptive. Websites can ban ip’s used in DDOS attacks even if the user never actually visited the site and thus could not have seen a ToS.

Without ToS’s companies might have to spend some small amount of money on court proceedings they would prefer to avoid. A portion of those lawsuits may be worthwhile.