American Congress Members Push for Easy to Read Terms of Service For Online Platforms

Everyone knows that you should read the terms of service before signing on to any kind of service or using any kind of product because of the fact that this is the sort of thing that could potentially end up protecting you from things that you would not have otherwise been aware of. However, suffice it to say that most people don’t end up reading these terms and conditions due to the reason that they are often too long and complicated.

This is a serious problem since it prevents people from truly knowing what they are signing up for, and many corporations try to use this to their advantage by creating unnecessarily complex terms of service that often use hard to decipher legalese. With all of that having been said and now out of the way, it is important to note that American lawmakers are trying to change that with their latest legislation.

The main purpose of this legislation is to make terms of service much easier to read by having them written in simple language that does not contain unnecessarily obtuse terminology with all things having been considered and taken into account. It’s called the Terms-of-service Labeling, Design and Readability Act which spells out TLDR, a commonly used acronym on the internet. They want tech companies to model their terms of service in the form of nutrition labels and the like.

What’s more is that these lawmakers want corporations to make their terms of service easier to examine through the addition of XML tags and the like. These will enable researchers to look through the more detailed terms of service and make sure that the summary actually reflects whatever has been written therein. This legislation is currently being passed through the House of Representatives, and it will need to go through the Senate before it becomes an actual law.


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