ToS;DR does ‘hard work’ for people with no time to read terms of service

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Washington, Aug. 19: Terms of Service (ToS) are just a speed bump for most of us who are on the way to signing up for Internet services, but a new project called ‘ToS;DR’ wants to help you understand.

Terms of Service agreements are often very long and are almost always written in horrible legalese that even lawyers have trouble going through.

So, almost no one reads them; we all just click ‘agree’ and move on.

The site’s somewhat awkward name is a play on the common TL;DR abbreviation, too long; didn’t read, which fits perfectly with most people’s approach to ToS agreements.

As the site says, “‘I have read and agree to the Terms’ is the biggest lie on the web. We aim to fix that.”

ToS;DR creates report cards for ToS agreements, highlighting any particularly nasty things you might be agreeing to.

For example, the popular Twitter image sharing service Twitpic’s ToS has a provision that allows the company and its partners to use your content without giving you credit.

That policy, along with some other egregious terms in Twitpic’s ToS, earn the company a grade ‘E’ an ignominious distinction of being the worst-rated company on ToS;DR right now.

Of course at the moment ToS;DR still hasn’t graded very many companies.

GitHub earns a “B”, with some good points alongside a few bad ones, like the provision – common to a great many sites – that “your account can be suspended and your data deleted any time for any reason.”

Delicious earns a “D”; DuckDuckGo, popular for its policy of not tracking users, manages an “A”, ToS;DR’s highest rating.

For each site ToS;DR provides the actual text of the ToS as well as an area to quote and discuss the terms, calling out anything that might potentially take away users’ rights.

Like the nascent Chrome plugin, ToS;DR is a work in progress. The vast majority of popular web services still haven’t been graded, though many do have a partial list of problematic elements. (ANI)