Well, kind of. It’s not always realistic, but it’s also not super realistic to just say “well fuck, nobody reads contracts anyway, let’s just let the courts decide what’s fair.” The courts decide in extreme cases of unconscionability, and in those cases, “there’s no way they read it” is a very small factor, but yeah, if you don’t want to be screwed, read.
One thing to note: most websites these days use arbitration clauses making it very hard to sue them. The Netscape case by Sotomayor helps with this, but not really since that was clickwrap and here you’re continually using a service. The WhatsApp terms are especially bad, as they allow facebook to upload all of your contacts to their servers (for some reason), and include a lot of other extreme clauses.
There are a few services like “Terms of Service Didn’t Read” that help to tell you which services have bad terms and which ones have awful terms, but good ToU are extremely rare.
Well, kind of. It’s not always realistic, but it’s also not super realistic to just say “well fuck, nobody reads contracts anyway, let’s just let the courts decide what’s fair.” The courts decide in extreme cases of unconscionability, and in those cases, “there’s no way they read it” is a very small factor, but yeah, if you don’t want to be screwed, read.
One thing to note: most websites these days use arbitration clauses making it very hard to sue them. The Netscape case by Sotomayor helps with this, but not really since that was clickwrap and here you’re continually using a service. The WhatsApp terms are especially bad, as they allow facebook to upload all of your contacts to their servers (for some reason), and include a lot of other extreme clauses.
There are a few services like “Terms of Service Didn’t Read” that help to tell you which services have bad terms and which ones have awful terms, but good ToU are extremely rare.