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Comment by mkirklions | Hacker News Reader

>a user is responsible for whom they give their username and password to.

In 2009, when I signed up for facebook, I was signing up for facebook.

Not sharing with political groups and enterprises.

No one reads ToS and at that point, it should be nullified. Everyone loses their FB accounts because YOU didnt read the ToS. Facebook loses their business because they lied about people reading and accepting their ToS.

Its important to be reasonable, FB definitely went full corruption and blaming the billions of customers is laughable.

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I pretty much agree with your points, but I don't see the relationship to this topic. It seems possible that you have misunderstood what these news stories are about (or equally possible that I have). This story is about Facebook giving "privileged API access" to certain companies. That means that when users give their login credentials to those companies, they can access certain data about the users in certain ways. However, as I said above, if the user gives those companies login credentials, the user is already putting a frighteningly large amount of trust in that third party. There needs to be much more awareness of this.

You're blaming facebook because people don't read ToS?

And then you try to tell people to be reasonable? That's like the pot calling the kettle black, isn't it?

In many countries, like Germany, surprising provisions in consumer terms of service are unenforceable for exactly this reason (and other reasons).

In my opinion, it's American over-adherence to legal formalism to the benefit of powerful companies and the detriment of consumers that is unreasonable, not the German approach. And I say this as an American myself.

USA has very similar laws and legal tradition about what makes a contract valid.

The German (civil law) and US (common law) legal traditions are pretty disparate, including their approaches to contract law - but in this case the difference is due to consumer protection rules in Germany and Europe, not anything longstanding about either tradition.

I know very little about US law and even less about German law, but I think GP was referring to contracts of adhesion, which are less enforceable in the US too, afaik; even if the laws are far stronger in Germany and have different historical origins, maybe there's at least some spiritual similarity between the protections?

While it's true that contracts of adhesion are less enforceable in the US than other contracts, they're still very enforceable.

In particular, if there's some evidence that a consumer clicked a check box saying "I accept the terms of service" on a web form before submitting it, where a link to the full terms of service was offered and the check box was not checked by default, US courts will uphold far less friendly terms than German courts will.

Hey do you read the ToS?

Before you get too excited about legal jargon, no one reads the ToS. There was some study saying it would take years of your life to read it, let alone try to understand it.

ToS that are unreadable should be thrown out in court.

Everyone, including facebook knows that these are not read.

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