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Comment by Hackbraten | Hacker News Reader

What I do is spot check, i.e. open an agreement, pick two or three spots at random, and do my best to read and understand those. My hope is if just 1000 people did that, they’d be able to collectively spot unexpected/unacceptable terms and make them public.

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Good idea. I might start doing this

Sounds like building something simple that aids in tracking “coverage” of reviewing ToSs could be useful to increase that the odds of spotting something untoward?

Iirc there was (is?) a site which gives a rating to the various license agreements of popular services and the like, so maybe it’s a solved problem?

I have the TOS;DR extension [1] and it gives a rating to each website's TOS and offers an explanation of the key points.

[1] https://tosdr.org/

I remember seeing iTunes terms tell me I could not use the software to run a nuclear reactor

They're just Debbie Downers trying to stop you having the mother of all acid lights shows by bouncing control rods in a Ibisa swimming pool reactor.

Cherenkov radiation for the masses I say.

and what if you find something? tweet into the void?

If it’s an app from a walled garden, you can leave a critical review. People can filter for those before they buy or download.

If it’s some other piece of software, you can go to a package repository such as the AUR [1] or Chocolatey [2], and leave a comment for the package even if it’s non-free.

If it’s a pure SaaS, there’s little you can do though, apart from tweeting, word-of-mouth, or Google reviews.

[1]: https://aur.archlinux.org

[2]: https://community.chocolatey.org/packages

I bet ChatGPT could summarize

What if one of the terms is that users may not use AI to summarize the TOS?

Then my assumption would be they would require an agreement in place prior to disclosing the actual ToS, you can't be in a situation where you breach the ToS prior to digesting them.

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