Hello again, reporters! I’m going to go ahead and assume that when a website sends you a new terms of service, you go ahead and scroll down to the Agree button. Or at least I do.
I’ve looking for something that will do this for me, and the best I’ve found is TOS;DR. It stands for “Terms of Service; Didn’t Read” – an obvious play on TL;DR, or “too long; didn’t read.” (Or “teal deer” as it was called on LiveJournal back in the day.)
TOS;DR is crowdsourced, meaning people write volunteer summaries. This has a couple ramifications – for one, you’re relying on some random volunteer for your information, and for another, it might not have services you’re looking for. Instagram is on there, but Substack isn’t.
Just to be totally upfront, the summaries are not always totally clear, which is a side effect of the TOS themselves. The TOS;DR homepage starts off with summaries of popular sites like Facebook (unsurprisingly, terrible) and Wikipedia (pretty good). It also offers a browser extension, which is nice.
As always, if I was your lawyer, I would advise you to actually read through the TOS – but who has time for that? Let’s get things done!
One more thing...
Did you miss the last TFR? Digitize massive piles of paper documents with an old-fashioned portable scanner