Two Terms of Service ToS summary and rating sites
I have to admit that I'm often only looking loosely over Terms of Services and Privacy Policies when I install software or visit websites for the first time. The main reason for that is time, as it would take me most of the day to do so so that my productivity would crawl to a halt in the process.
The problem with most TOS is that you get pages of legalese to read through, and that you not only have to spend time doing so, but also understand some of the terms used in the document which may lead to additional research and sometimes maybe even a wrong interpretation of what is being said.
Two services aim to change that. The first and newer service, ToS;DR, has been making the rounds in the past couple of days. Terms of Service; Didn't Read rates website terms and privacy policies, providing you with an overall rating and a summary of the most important terms found in the policies.
Services are rated from A, the highest possible rating, to E, the lowest rating. At the time of writing, the popular Twitpic service is the only one that is rated with an E, while services like DuckDuckGo and SeenThis have received the highest rating. There is not a lot to see on the page yet, as many services seem to have only been partially analyzed yet. While you see summaries for Google, Facebook, Steam or Twitter on the front page, no class has been associated with those services yet.
Thankfully though it is the summary that is more important than the overall rating of a service. Each item in the summary is rated individually from bad (red) over medium (orange) and good (green) to neutral (gray).
Some summary items are not clear immediately. Steam's "no right to leave the service" for instance does not mean that you can't leave Steam as a service, or ask Valve to remove all your account related information after you quit using the service, but that you can't take games with you when you leave the service.
Terms of Services & Privacy Policies is the second service. It provides you with a highlights summary as well as on-page copies of a service's Privacy Policy and Terms of Service. What's interesting in this regard is that it includes both in the summary, and that you can compare services with each other on the site.
You can for instance compare Facebook and Google, or Dropbox with Amazon or Apple. You are however limited to a handful of services that have already been analyzed
Alternatives
Eula Analyzer is a free software for Windows that you can use to analyze license agreements. You basically copy and paste agreements, terms of services or privacy policies into the software and wait until it displays a summary of the agreement in its interface. The software has been designed for software agreements primarily though.
Common Terms is currently in alpha stage. It aims to provide you with a summary as well on the page where you have to accept the Terms of service and Privacy policy. It is not usable yet by the public but one to keep an eye on.
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Doesn’t Windows 8 know that www. or http:// are passe ?
Well it is a bit difficulty to distinguish between name.com domains and files for instance.
I know a service made by google that is similar to Google bookmarks.
http://www.google.com/saved
@Ashwin–Thankful you delighted my comment; who knows how many “gamers” would have disagreed!
@Martin
The comments section under this very article (3 comments) is identical to the comments section found under the following article:
https://www.ghacks.net/2023/08/15/netflix-is-testing-game-streaming-on-tvs-and-computers/
Not sure what the issue is, but have seen this issue under some other articles recently but did not report it back then.
Omg a badge!!!
Some tangible reward lmao.
It sucks that redditors are going to love the fuck out of it too.
With the cloud, there is no such thing as unlimited storage or privacy. Stop relying on these tech scums. Purchase your own hardware and develop your own solutions.
This is a certified reddit cringe moment. Hilarious how the article’s author tries to dress it up like it’s anything more than a png for doing the reddit corporation’s moderation work for free (or for bribes from companies and political groups)
Almost al unlmited services have a real limit.
And this comment is written on the dropbox article from August 25, 2023.
First comment > @ilev said on August 4, 2012 at 7:53 pm
For the God’s sake, fix the comments soon please! :[
Yes. Please. Fix the comments.
With Google Chrome, it’s only been 1,500 for some time now.
Anyone who wants to force me in such a way into buying something that I can get elsewhere for free will certainly never see a single dime from my side. I don’t even know how stupid their marketing department is to impose these limits on users instead of offering a valuable product to the paying faction. But they don’t. Even if you pay, you get something that is also available for free elsewhere.
The algorithm has also become less and less savvy in terms of e.g. English/German translations. It used to be that the bot could sort of sense what you were trying to say and put it into different colloquialisms, which was even fun because it was like, “I know what you’re trying to say here, how about…” Now it’s in parts too stupid to translate the simplest sentences correctly, and the suggestions it makes are at times as moronic as those made by Google Translations.
If this is a deep-learning AI that learns from users’ translations and the phrases they choose most often – which, by the way, is a valuable, moneys worthwhile contribution of every free user to this project: They invest their time and texts, thereby providing the necessary data for the AI to do the thing as nicely as they brag about it in the first place – alas, the more unprofessional users discovered the translator, the worse the language of this deep-learning bot has become, the greater the aggregate of linguistically illiterate users has become, and the worse the language of this deep-learning bot has become, as it now learns the drivel of every Tom, Dick and Harry out there, which is why I now get their Mickey Mouse language as suggestions: the inane language of people who can barely spell the alphabet, it seems.
And as a thank you for our time and effort in helping them and their AI learn, they’ve lowered the limit from what was once 5,000 to now 1,500…? A big “fuck off” from here for that! Not a brass farthing from me for this attitude and behaviour, not in a hundred years.
When will you put an end to the mess in the comments?
Ghacks comments have been broken for too long. What article did you see this comment on? Reply below. If we get to 20 different articles we should all stop using the site in protest.
I posted this on [https://www.ghacks.net/2023/09/28/reddit-enforces-user-activity-tracking-on-site-to-push-advertising-revenue/] so please reply if you see it on a different article.
Comment redirected me to [https://www.ghacks.net/2012/08/04/add-search-the-internet-to-the-windows-start-menu/] which seems to be the ‘real’ article it is attached to
Comment redirected me to [https://www.ghacks.net/2012/08/04/add-search-the-internet-to-the-windows-start-menu/] which seems to be the ‘real’ article it is attached to
Article Title: Reddit enforces user activity tracking on site to push advertising revenue
Article URL: https://www.ghacks.net/2023/09/28/reddit-enforces-user-activity-tracking-on-site-to-push-advertising-revenue/
No surprises here. This is just the beginning really. I cannot see a valid reason as to why anyone would continue to use the platform anymore when there are enough alternatives fill that void.
I’m not sure if there is a point in commenting given that comments seem to appear under random posts now, but I’ll try… this comment is for https://www.ghacks.net/2023/09/28/reddit-enforces-user-activity-tracking-on-site-to-push-advertising-revenue/
My temporary “solution”, if you can call it that, is to use a VPN (Mullvad in my case) to sign up for and access Reddit via a European connection. I’m doing that with pretty much everything now, at least until the rest of the world catches up with GDPR. I don’t think GDPR is a magical privacy solution but it’s at least a first step.