Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by johannes1234321 1991 days ago
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)
1 comments
WindyLakeReturn 1991 days ago
>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.

link
bigwavedave 1991 days ago
>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.

link
WindyLakeReturn 1991 days ago
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.

link
bigwavedave 1991 days ago
That's fair, I'll concede that.
link
johannes1234321 1991 days ago
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)

link