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Comment by gen220 | Hacker News Reader

It's difficult because digital ToS are so tightly tailored to your business, and digital businesses are so malleable and formless.

If you went through the effort to standardize your ToS, it would only be "useful" to a tiny handful of businesses at specific points in their growth trajectory.

Regulations like GDPR are a top-down approach to the privacy component of a Terms of Service (i.e. there are only so many variations to the privacy sections within a ToS that comply with GDPR), but there are so many more components than just customer data locality.

That being said, as a privacy-respecting entrepreneur, coming up with a "user-respecting" (i.e. win/win, legible, minimally-demanding/withholding) ToS is a sizable challenge. It'd be nice to have templates. I basically resort to reading the ToS of companies I respect in similar verticals.

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Is that true? Often ToS seem to mostly consist of boilerplate that's copied from business to business

Imagine there were a set of a few common terms that businesses could select, each with an icon, a high-level explanation, and the detailed legal copy.

I think there is a common set of those that would probably cover 80% of needs.

The remaining 20% could be "extended", custom terms for this company.

Such a system seems like it would make things much easier for consumers to understand, and also save legal fees for most companies. Maybe a good standard for a TOS-generator company to design and promote?

In general the problem is not that the documents are not readable or comprehensible - I understand perfectly well that in legalese it says that the situation will favor the business in every possible legal fashion and if some of those are not legal the remaining document will favor the business in every remaining possible fashion.

The problem is they are contracts of adhesion that consumers don’t have a real interest or consideration in, other than the performance being conditioned upon your agreement, and which they do not have any ability to debate or modify or generally any recourse except to go to another business with an equally odious contract as a condition of performance.

They’re not incomprehensible, they’re unconscionable, and solutions tackling the former are missing the point.

The problem is that the same “lobbying” that produced the regulatory environment permitting such contracts to be forced upon consumers also precludes any real attempt to tackle the latter. Businesses would scream here if you forced them to follow standard consumer protections, and our system is oriented to favor their interests over consumers in nearly every possible scenario as well.

Another “continental” solution to this would simply be to outlaw contracts of adhesion or contracts in which the consumer does not receive a consideration (other than performance of the contract). If you don’t have a consideration it’s simply not a valid or consciencable contract, people don’t agree to give up money or rights voluntarily in return for nothing, therefore these contracts must facially be coercive.

There is already a set of common terms although businesses don't get more of a say there than other people.

Those terms also don't have icons but they usually shorthands you can use to refer to them. GDPR is a pretty well known one but there are many more.

> If you went through the effort to standardize your ToS, it would only be "useful" to a tiny handful of businesses at specific points in their growth trajectory.

Sounds like the kind of language used by people who consider consumer protection to something to work around to maximise profit. Yeah, those businesses can get fucked.

> That being said, as a privacy-respecting entrepreneur, coming up with a "user-respecting" (i.e. win/win, legible, minimally-demanding/withholding) ToS is a sizable challenge. It'd be nice to have templates. I basically resort to reading the ToS of companies I respect in similar verticals.

Its only a sizable challenge if you want to seize more rights for yourself than is already guaranteed by existing laws.

Respectfully, have you ever tried to write a ToS?

Part of the ToS is explaining exactly what you do as a business with users' data and IP that they submit to your service. If you're maximally ethical, you still have to outline everything, and yes doing this concisely + precisely is a challenge.

Pulling an example out of a hat, see Mullvad's ToS[1] and Privacy Policy[2], and "No Logging" Policy [3].

I wouldn't say (at all) that Mullvad is trying to seize more rights that those guaranteed by existing laws, and yet maintaining their ToS almost certainly costs tens of thousands of dollars per year.

[1]: https://mullvad.net/en/help/terms-service

[2]: https://mullvad.net/en/help/privacy-policy

[3]: https://mullvad.net/en/help/no-logging-data-policy

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For another example, see Bandcamp's Terms of Use [1]. They straddle the line of social media (where you need the platform to be an effective moderator, which requires extensive ToU) and the music industry (which involves much liability around various IP rights).

Bandcamp isn't really screwing anybody. IMO the most objectionable thing they do is provide Google Analytics as a service to paid musicians. But the lines around that are <5% of their overall set of policies, precious few lines of which are objectionable.

[1]: https://bandcamp.com/terms_of_use

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