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by johnnygoods 4750 days ago
Be wary of installing this extension, and this is why:

It's not lost on the legal world that no one reads Terms of Service. As a result, TOS are rarely enforceable in court, except inasmuch as they comply with broad industry standards.

However, compliance requirements are much MORE strict for parties who demonstrably should be aware of their legal obligations. Lawyers, for example, can't really argue that they didn't read a legal document they executed because of the manner in which it was delivered (in an inscrutable TOS doc, at the entrance to an amusement park, etc).

If you install this extension, you might actually be making yourself MORE bound to crappy terms of service, since you will not be able to make the case that obviously you didn't read them terms and therefore should not be held to some non-standard provision.

The reviews/ratings provided by tosdr.org are awesome, and I hope you guys continue this project, but I, for one, will be covering my ass and not installing this extension.

5 comments

> If you install this extension, you might actually be making yourself MORE bound to crappy terms of service, since you will not be able to make the case that obviously you didn't read them terms and therefore should not be held to some non-standard provision.

I estimate the likelihood of me ending up in court over a TOS violation extremely low. In the history of the Web, how many times has a consumer been the recipient of a lawsuit over a TOS violation?

However, the likelihood is very high that I will encounter TOS provisions on the Web that are objectionable to me. I would like to know what these provisions are, even if I am forced to click accept because I want to use the service anyway.

I am not a fan of maintaining ignorance for the sake of plausible deniability.

Jan from ToS;DR here: Rating the websites and making these ratings easily available is only the first step.

Raising people’s awareness of bad terms and then getting services to actually use proper terms is the actual goal.

Even by stating that you wont be installing the extension to cover your ass, you clearly know you should be reading the terms of service...
That's assuming that this post is linked to him/her and comes back to haunt later.
Does what you say have any legal merit? Sure, I can imagine a Judge saying "Eh, no one reads those things" because it is fun to think that way but I'm not sure I think this is right.
Catch-22.