Watchdog group hopes to revive TOSBack, as similar online resource emerges
Dormant for a year now, an Electronic Frontier Foundation service dedicated to tracking changes in major website terms of service may “soon” reemerge in new form, says EFF. Meanwhile there’s a separate effort under way to address the same issue: That issue being that precious few people bother to read terms of service before agreeing to them and fewer still are made aware when those terms change.
EFF launched its TOS-monitoring service, called TOSBack, in June 2009, but the project’s last TOS change entry was logged about this time last year. Having only recently noticed its apparent demise, I asked EFF what I thought was the obvious question: Had the project succumbed to the same general disinterest toward reading terms of service agreements that prompted its creation?
“Actually, people were very interested in this project, and we routinely get questions on why it hasn’t been updated,” replied EFF media relations director Rebecca Jeschke. “It turned out that in its current version, keeping it current took more maintenance than we had time for. We are hoping to come out with a new version soon, as many folks have requested it and there is a lot of demand.”
Jeschke checked with EFF’s technical team and was told there is no more specific timetable for the return of TOSBack.
Meanwhile, the demand she cites may be reflected in a separate grassroots initiative — called Terms of Service; Didn’t Read (TOS;DR) – that has been trying to gain traction this summer under the direction of Hugo Roy, a law student and self-proclaimed “hactivist” affiliated with the Free Software Foundation Europe.
From a story on Time.com:
So far the site has gathered information on more than 30 popular websites. Sites can be rated in categories such as content ownership, use of tracking cookies, and terms of service readability. Only a few have been assigned grades so far. Search engine DuckDuckGo has earned an A because, unlike Google, it doesn’t track your searches. Meanwhile the Twitter-based photo-sharing app TwitPic earned an E, the lowest grade possible, because the company has the right to license your photos and sell them to media companies without your knowledge. Other tech companies have buried more interesting surprises in their terms, such as blocking the ability to file class-action lawsuits.
“There’s a systemic problem there,” Roy says, “and it boils down to the fact that relationships between users and services are very uneven, and sometimes also unfair.”
The TOS;DR site credits the EFF’s TOSBack project as one of several inspirations for its creation, so perhaps it would make sense for the two to join forces rather than address the same issue — and same challenges — simultaneously.
(Network World staff writer Jon Gold contributed to this post.)
