Comment by throwawayjava | Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwawayjava | Hacker News Reader

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> The difference is that one is expected to consent and be beholden to something they could not reasonably understand without paying a large amount of money to a specialist.

I've found that this is generally less true than I imagine it to be. A lot of law is not actually so difficult to understand. Legalese is still English, and Google is great for figuring out the odd meanings of certain terms of art.

Most of the exceptions I've come across (e.g., buying a house) are IMO actually intrinsically complex transactions. I could undestand, but it'd take so long. And the time taken would happen even if we only had the laws we needed and all those laws were written in plain english. In software terms, lots of essential complexity.

Going back to the article, the problem with Facebook's terms and conditions is definitely not understandability -- see https://www.facebook.com/policy.php. The average high schooler could understand. The problem is people caring enough to 1) find, 2) read, and 3) inconviencance themselves if they don't like the policies.

I beg to differ.

> Waving a 2-inch-thick printed version of the social network’s user agreement, Senator Lindsey Graham quoted a line from the first page, then intoned: “I’m a lawyer, and I have no idea what that means.”

1) Two inch thick I've read some pretty long books in my time but that takes the cake. Most people these days don't even have enough attention span to read a complete internet article. How do you expect them to plough through hundreds of pages of legalese?

2) “I’m a lawyer, and I have no idea what that means.” Do I even need to say any more?

You can simultaneously believe that

* FB is doing their absolute best to make sure no "user" understands what they have agreed to

* writing the law in "plain english" is the stupidest thing I've ever heard of in my life. See the multi million dollar lawsuit this year about whether a missing Oxford comma changed wage rules for a class of truck drivers. Any attempt to write law in plain english introduces giant ambiguities [1].

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/09/us/oxford-comma-maine.htm...

That law you cited was not written in "plain English." It was Maine's legal code. And it was ambiguous.

And plain english would have made that better?

Easily.

In the sense of introducing far far more ambiguity and making the law incomprehensible, yes.

You obviously didn't look at the law you are speaking about.

> FB is doing their absolute best to make sure no "user" understands what they have agreed to*

But before making this argument, one should go read FB's ToS and data policy. Here they are:

https://www.facebook.com/terms.php

https://www.facebook.com/policy.php

Where, precisely, is the bit where they steal data from my phone about sms and phone calls?

> Where, precisely...

Right here, clear as day: "We collect information from or about the computers, phones, or other devices where you install or access our Services, depending on the permissions you’ve granted"

Also notice that if they have that data, you explicitly gave permission to access phone/SMS data in the app install process; i.e., you granted those permissions.

> ...steal...

Again, that's the problem! Facebook didn't STEAL that data. They took it with your permission. And they were actually very clear in their policies about the fact that they could take pretty much anything you gave them device premissions to access.

This is NOT a "users can't understand legalese" issue. It's very clear from the above sentence in the data policy that Facebook has the right to record arbitrary shit off of your phone/computer.

This IS a "users don't care and don't have any data clawback rights" issue. Or perhaps a "users are too trusting" issue. But any high schooler could interpret the above sentence as meaning that Facebook does, technically, have the right to collect any information from your phone if you give device permissions.

The distinction is important because it determines appropriate solutions. The solution is NOT making ToS easier to read. The solution is stronger consumer data rights (aka a mechanism to clawback data after the fact) and better consumer education (aka be paranoid)

If you think that merely making ToS easier to read and understand will substantially change consumer behavior, you're in for lots of disappointment.

No, it's not clear at all, and wasn't clear to virtually anyone who agreed to it.

Care to propose a rephrasing that's more clear? If the average person can't understand the meaning of that sentence, the only real solution is to improve K-12 English teaching.

> and wasn't clear to virtually anyone who agreed to it

Virtually everyone who agreed to it never bothered to even try to read the policy in the first place. So, really, what difference does that make?

Again, the fundamental point is that chasing ToS clarity/readability/length is a losing battle. The majority of consumers don't care enough to read, no matter how simple you make things. Improving this metric won't make a difference. This issue is a red herring. Focus efforts elsewhere: consumer education and consumer rights.

Facebook terms of service: https://www.facebook.com/terms.php

Facebook data policy: https://www.facebook.com/policy.php

I agree Lindsay Graham is a skilled orator and politician. But if he blew up the font size until those pages required two inches of 8x11 paper, he must have just terrible eyesight ;-)

Also, neither of those documents is terribly difficult to understand. Like... where, specifically, is Graham getting horribly confused?! Point to the concrete line in one of those two links that requires something beyond a high school education!

Now, I'm sure there's nuance I don't pick up on. But I definitely feel I can understand the ToS and privacy policy without consulting a lawyer.

I don't think some of the terms are fair. But that's a consumer rights issue, not a "legalese" issue.

More generally, on two occasions I've had to get in front of a real judge in a "real" courtroom and make an argument based upon some written piece of law I had to look up and interpret myself. In both cases, I was able to successfully convince a judge that I was on the right side of the law without the help of a lawyer. I'm certainly not saying that's always possible, but I do believe there is a lot of "learned helplessness" when it comes to digging through legeal code or contracts and reading legalese. It's a PITA sometimes, but in many many cases it doesn't require years of training.

I wonder if it would be possible to create an AI that, given a legalese text, could output comments for each fragment explaining and showing examples of what it means. Now that I think about it, wasn't genius.com doing something like that but using crowdsourcing instead?

Privacy policies actually use this as a rhetorical trick to confuse users. E.g., they'll say stuff like "we may collect any device information you give permissions to access to do [reasonable thing A], [reasonable thing B], or for any other business purposes. Examples of device information include: [insert list of benign things]"

Or, to put emphasis on the important things:

"we may (read: WILL) collect ANY device information you give permissions to access to do [reasonable thing A], [reasonable thing B], or for ANY other business purposes. Examples of device information include: [insert list of benign things you should totally ignore]"

But here's the problem with the "AI tell us all" approach. If you use ML to mine examples from existing policy texts, you'll end up showing the user all of the benign stuff that the companies put in to reassure users, because that's what the corpus contains. Therefore, your AI will emphasize exactly the wrong types of examples.

Also, notice that this isn't even a legalese thing. There are no legal terms of art or long-winding difficult grammatical constructions. It's just plain old good rhetoric. And it's hard/impossible to legislate away persuasion.

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