Site Reads and Explains Terms of Service for You

tos dr more details
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Terms of Service; Didn’t Read (ToS;DR) is a site that essentially distills the Terms of Service from hundreds of online companies and sites, provides a synopsis of those Terms of Service, and rates those terms of service for you.

The ratings range from Class A (meaning very good) to Class E (meaning very bad).

Not surprisingly, the larger the company (cough – YouTube, Twitter), the lower the rating, while smaller, more privacy conscientious organizations (such as DuckDuckGo, the “search engine that doesn’t track you”) tend to rate more highly.

As we have previously reported, studies show that nobody actually reads terms of service, and in large part that is because they are so ridiculously long, and often impenetrable.

Terms of Service; Didn’t Read aims to remedy that – at least the part where people don’t know what they are agreeing to before they agree to it.

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Explains the ToS; DR site, “Terms of service are often too long to read, but it’s important to understand what’s in them. Your rights online depend on them. We hope that our ratings can help you get informed about your rights.”

The rating system works like this:

Go to the ToS; DR site, and find the company or organization whose Terms of Service you want to see summarized and reviewed. On the home page are summaries of the Terms of Service for dozens of companies – many of which are not yet rated, but many of which are.

ToS; DR ratings for Delicious and for DuckDuckGo
terms of service didnt read tos dr summary

In addition to the summary for a given company, you can click on “More
details” to get a detailed analysis of the company’s ToS.

delicious terms of service on tos dr

Terms of Service; Didn’t Read is the brainchild of Hugo Roy, a law student and self-described hacktivist. You can learn more about the project at the ToS,DR site.

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One thought on “Site Reads and Explains Terms of Service for You

  1. I tried it for a week.

    Duck Duck I used last year, so I thought I’d see if there were any improvements… nope! Still slow, with no pictures to identify the sites – back to Google (again)!

    ToS;DR: During the hundreds of sites I accessed, did NOT find a single one that was registered with them!

    Deleted both as useless, and taking up resources.

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