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Comment by Eisenstein | Hacker News Reader

If a ToS is going to be a contract, it has to be interpretable by the person hitting 'agree', no? If someone is confused about what it means and reaches out to the company and they respond by locking the user out of their account which they use to generate their livelihood, it has stopped being an 'oopsie' and become a 'we don't care about our customers, we only care what they give us and will use strangely worded legalese and extortion to get it'.

The response of 'why would they ever assume bad intention by a startup tech company which pivoted recently to focus on AI offerings' crocodile tears just makes it worse.

At this point, barring the existence of an impeccable and long-running reputation, if you assume that any place you store your data is not going to screw you the moment they can to make a buck, then you are hopelessly naive.

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>If a ToS is going to be a contract, it has to be interpretable by the person hitting 'agree', no?

That is why other counterpart would also hire a lawyer.

Get a life. You can’t go through an average day without using a dozen services that you’d have to hire a lawyer to interpret their TOS.

If you want to hire a full-time personal counsel, go for it.

The rest of us insist on something else. Understandable agreements is something that should be forced on all companies unless we can perhaps win the fight against TOS being legally enforceable in the first place. That would be the best world.

The issue of legalese in ToS is the same issue of "bad code" or "bad engineering". The law is just another system, another conceptual language of communication, except one filled with way more vaguaries, edge cases and grey areas than any software we make.

Companies like they do not want to pay for "good engineering" don't want to pay for "understandable contracts".

Then don't blame the customer for misinterpreting it when it is done terribly.

Except paying lawyers $400+/h rarely results in "understandable contracts".

The legal industry is self-creating this issue because that makes their services more necessary.

It certainly is an example of the agency problem.

However the company itself doesn't want to allocate resources regardless of the actual cost.

Because regardless at your $/hr, a contract that protects the company in the same way and is understandable by the user takes MORE HOURS, than one that just protects the company and fuck the user.

Lots of these lawyers at companies with internal council could do this are a resource that is over utilized already. There's no room for more hours.

>The legal industry is self-creating this issue because that makes their services more necessary.

I guess that is similar to software industry creating insane complexity to make their job more necessary.

I don't think most people would be able to afford an emotional support lawyer

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