Crowdsourcing for caveats
If Iggy Pop is just the passenger, why is he the one sorting out the car insurance? Or indeed selling it. “I’m not selling insurance, I’m selling time.”
All of the insurance ads seem to be emphasising speed and convenience at the moment. One insurance comparison site sponsors “24″ on Sky, which is surely the pornography of effective time-management.
Not being a car owner I’ve never tried these services myself. I can only assume that their major breakthrough is that they’ve dispensed with the many dense pages of legalese usually presented when buying insurance. Possibly, they’ve been replaced by a short series of simple manga-style diagrams?
After all, the ads don’t proclaim “Get a quote in minutes… then spend a couple of hours wading through terms. Bring a sandwich.”
I jest, of course. The only time anyone reads their insurance policy is after they’ve been denied a claim. Who has time? It’s less “caveat emptor”, more “festinet emptor”.
Maybe it’s to be expected from insurance policies, but it seems that every action on a computer presents you with some legal contract of sorts. Its like a blight on the web. Want to register for a website, buy something online, install a piece of software? You’ve just agreed to the following non-negotiated terms…
If I want to watch TV I can somehow do so without being presented with any kind of contract. If I want to watch the same programmes on my computer, on a service run by the TV station, it’s apparently become a matter for the lawyers. Computers = risk.
“Print this for your records” they sometimes suggest, imagining that people still have printers at home. If you’re me you hit print, set the printer type to PDF and file destination to “~/Documents/legalbullshit/”. I rarely read them, of course. I used to skim through them but invariably you’ll come across a part that says they can modify the terms without notification at any time. So, complete waste of time then. It’s like that fabled test which instructs you to read through the paper, has a page full of questions, and at the end instructs you not to answer any of them.
And, in the US at least, anyone breaking these (modifiable without notice) website Terms of Service can apparently be subject to criminal prosecution. The Internet is serious business.
You end up hoping that the “many eyeballs” axiom of the open source world has some sort of equivalent here; that there’s some dedicated individual looking for the evil “first born” clauses. Indeed, when a recent change to the Facebook TOS (not widely announced by Facebook, natch) was made, it caused a stink on a few blogs. Commenters seemed outraged that they would try to slip something like this by.
So these things are prevalent, but where are the tools for managing them? Where’s the security update tool equivalent? What if, instead of just saving these documents, I imported them into desktop software or web-service. When the terms change, I receive notification. If I’m presented with a new document detailing terms, I get to easily see the diffs – and then be one step away from a wiki discussing the implications.
Companies could play nice with this ecosystem by presenting downloadable dated and versioned XML formats of their terms. Perhaps even participating in related discussions and providing justifications. But it wouldn’t be necessary, all we’d need is a few healthily paranoid individuals looking out for us all, something that will always be available.
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