Your Cure for TL;DR and Terms of Service Agreements

TL; DR — do you know this slang?  It's an abbreviation for Too Long; Didn't Read. And it's the way most people feel about reading Terms of Service (TOS) agreements that we agree to abide by in order to use a service or a website like Google. 

Oh, you say you didn't know you'd agreed to the TOS for Google?  Well, if you've ever used Google, it means you've agreed, albeit tacitly.  ("By using our Services, you are agreeing to these terms.")

Most TOS agreements start out by saying "Please read them carefully".  Yeah right.

Good news — the ToS;DR (Terms of Service; Didn't Read) website cuts through a TOS' verbiage and makes the fine print easy to understand at a glance.

“I have read and agree to the Terms” is the biggest lie on the web.  We aim to fix that.
We are a user rights initiative to rate and label website terms & privacy policies, from very good Class A to very bad Class E

Choose from popular services like Facebook, Amazon, Wikipedia, Skype, Delicious, Twitter, Apple, and Dropbox.  At a glance you can see the "thumbs up" and "thumbs down", and click the Expand button for details, and there's also a link to the full TOS:

They aim to create "a transparent and peer-reviewed process to rate and analyse Terms of Service and Privacy Policies in order to create a rating from Class A to Class E."  Here's a screenshot of their rating system:

Found at Finally, Someone Read the Terms of Service So You Don't Have To [The Atlantic]
Photo credit: Niklas Pivic via Flickr
Hat tip to Know Your Meme: tl;dr

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