Here’s another reputational rankings initiative, about something we all encounter whenever we use a new service on the web.

According to Terms of Service; Didn’t Read (TOS;DR),

“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

They’ve got a bit of press, such as on Lifehacker Australia and this one by Jason Gilbert on Huffington Post 10 August 2012, ToS;DR Explains Those Ridiculous Terms Of Service You Agreed To

Quick: If the government asks Facebook for information from your account, does Facebook have to inform you of the request? If you delete your Twitter account, does Twitter still own the content of your tweets? Can Google appropriate your content for use on its other services without notifying you or asking your permission?

You probably don’t know the answer to these three questions off the top of your head, but you did claim to know the answers when you agreed to the respective Terms of Service (ToS) agreements upon signing up for these three popular websites. Facebook doesn’t have to inform you of government requests; Twitter will own your tweets after you deactivate; Google can use any of your content; and you signed off on all three by consenting to the ToS.

The article also gets to the main point:

ToS;DR is also in the process of ranking each service, as a whole, based on how user-friendly its ToS is judged to be.

That’s what has a chance of getting the obfuscatory confusopoly of jargon-filled TOS cleaned up: reputational rankings. They even have multiple rankings, for each clause of each TOS, such as for Third Parties and for “You cannot delete your account”. Plus an overall class for each service.

So TOS;DR is a little like what we’re doing at SpamRankings.net. There are many differences. TOS;DR doesn’t order the services by classes, and the classes themselves are more like the certificates we’ve got on the roadmap than like our monthly rankings. Also TOS;DR’s data is crowd-sourced, while ours is from much more copious spam blocklist data.

It will be interesting to watch this one to see what results TOS;DR gets as far as changes in the TOS services publish.

-jsq