I have often been annoyed by Terms Of Service agreements you have to click on and agree to in order to install a piece of software.  It might be some software you just want to look at and once you try it you never look at it again.  Doesn’t matter, you don’t know if you sold your soul somewhere in some sub- sub- clause. At least I can use a throw-away email address when signing up for most applications.

But I think that all these End User License Agreements and Terms of Service agreements should be natural fodder for a peer-reviewed summaries of these agreements. And then I found ToS:DR, which seems to try this. I am still looking it over, but it seems to provide point by point elements of the agreements and whether those points are good, bad or neutral.  They are looking for the community to provide input on different services. I am going to make LibraryThing  the service I will experiment with.

The other part of this I would like to see are reviews of the phrases in the boilerplate template clauses for the Terms of service Agreements. What phrasing is considered user friendly, what is considered user hostile? Maybe taking each phrase and translating it into plain english.

AND WHY IS THE LIABILITY SECTION ALWAYS IN ALL CAPS?