conclusions from the ToS;DR workshop

[Michiel de Jong]

Hi!

Just a quick write-up of http://events.ccc.de/camp/2011/wiki/ToS;DR - We talked about different ways in which Terms of Service can be bad:

- not defend your interests when the government comes asking for your data

- sell your data to advertisers

- the application provider themselves looking at your data

- (this one is more in the UX than in the ToS) the application encouraging oversharing - make you share more than you actually wanted to.

- whether the site allow pseudonymity

- not all companies necessarily enforce their ToS. It can be that some stuff is in there because their government forces them to put it in there, but they will not actively enforce things. this is hard to measure though, and quickly becomes anecdotical evidence. it would be good to provide annotation tools for this though.

We need a crowd-reading tool, similar to universal subtitles, that allows the crowd-reading of ToS, tagging each line with a category. Then from that list of categories, up-vote and down-vote to arrive at a 0- to 5-star rating.

Another good idea that came out of the workshop was that the browser plugin that shows the 0- to 5-star rating could also GreaseMonkey highlights into the page that shows the ToS, so that you can see highlighted which sections you should pay special attention to when checking the box to accept long ToS.

A student could write this software either as a Praktikum or an Abschlussarbeit. I'll try to find someone who would want to pick this up from here. I'll try to get as far as I can with this before Tuesday, but then I have to park it and get on with other stuff I want to finish before our project birthday (four weeks left!). So if anybody is reading is and is interested in contributing, please get in touch!

Cheers,

Michiel