Terms Of Service Agreements Research Articles

Terms-we-serve-with: Five dimensions for anticipating and repairing algorithmic harm

Power and information asymmetries between people and digital technology companies are further legitimized through contractual agreements that fail to provide meaningful consent and contestability. In particular, the Terms-of-Service (ToS) agreement, is a contract of adhesion where companies effectively set the terms and conditions of the contract. Whereas, ToS reinforce existing structural inequalities, we seek to enable an intersectional accountability mechanism grounded in the practice of algorithmic reparation. Building on existing critiques of ToS in the context of algorithmic systems, we return to the roots of contract theory by recentering notions of agency and mutual assent. We evolve a multipronged intervention we frame as the Terms-we-Serve-with (TwSw) social, computational, and legal framework. The TwSw is a new social imaginary centered on: (1) co-constitution of user agreements, through participatory mechanisms; (2) addressing friction, leveraging the fields of design justice and critical design in the production and resolution of conflict; (3) enabling refusal mechanisms, reflecting the need for a sufficient level of human oversight and agency including opting out; (4) complaint and algorithmic harms reporting, through a feminist studies lens and open-sourced computational tools; and (5) disclosure-centered mediation, to disclose, acknowledge, and take responsibility for harm, drawing on the field of medical law. We further inform our analysis through an exploratory design workshop with a South African gender-based violence reporting AI startup. We derive practical strategies for communities, technologists, and policy-makers to leverage a relational approach to algorithmic reparation and propose there's a need for a radical restructuring of the “take-it-or-leave-it” ToS agreement.

Research Ethics in the Age of Digital Platforms

Scientific research is growingly increasingly reliant on "microwork" or "crowdsourcing" provided by digital platforms to collect new data. Digital platforms connect clients and workers, charging a fee for an algorithmically managed workflow based on Terms of Service agreements. Although these platforms offer a way to make a living or complement other sources of income, microworkers lack fundamental labor rights and basic safe working conditions, especially in the Global South. We ask how researchers and research institutions address the ethical issues involved in considering microworkers as "human participants." We argue that current scientific research fails to treat microworkers in the same way as in-person human participants, producing de facto a double morality: one applied to people with rights acknowledged by states and international bodies (e.g., the Helsinki Declaration), the other to guest workers of digital autocracies who have almost no rights at all. We illustrate our argument by drawing on 57 interviews conducted with microworkers in Spanish-speaking countries.

An empirical analysis of consumer-unfriendly E-commerce terms of service agreements: Implications for customer satisfaction and business survival

• We use text mining to identify harmful e-commerce terms of service (ToS) clauses. • We present a prototype tool that scans ToS and assigns severity rankings. • We identify the impact of customer unfriendly clauses on business performance. • Businesses with higher market share prefer less consumer-unfriendly ToS terms. • The effect of market share on customer satisfaction is partially mediated by ToS. E-business user agreements are seldom read but almost always accepted by users. We present an in-depth analysis of e-user agreement issues using textual data on Terms of Service (ToS) agreements from more than 250 e-commerce companies. Our text mining analysis identifies several terms in ToS that pose significant risks to consumers. We propose a prototype text mining process that scans ToS agreements on behalf of consumers and assigns an overall severity score based on the potential threats. We supplement this with Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) for topic modeling in our corpus of ToS documents, to identify user-unfriendly clauses from ToS documents. Next, our empirical analysis reveals three novel findings. First, the presence of hostile clauses in ToS negatively impacts customer satisfaction but is associated with higher survival of firms. Second, firms with higher market share prefer less consumer-unfriendly terms in their ToS. Third, the impact of market share on firm performance is partially mediated by ToS severity. Overall, this study analyzes the linkage between market share, ToS severity, and firm performance, and provides significant insights on ToS policies to IS scholars, legal experts, and firms.

Regulating and representing camming: Strict limits on acceptable content on webcam sex platforms

This article analyses the discursive construction of the limits of webcamming in terms of service agreements by BongaCams, LiveJasmin and Chaturbate, three of the world’s most popular webcam sex platforms. Through this analysis, the moderation practices in the webcamming industry are examined. Regulation of sexual platforms and its implications for representations of online sex work are still largely unclear. Through a critical discourse analysis of seven webcam platform terms of service documents, this article scrutinises the norms for camming as dictated by industry leading platforms. This analysis shows that these platforms, for legal and financial reasons, reject the idea of camming as sexually explicit or as (sex) work. Such a construction of camming limits sexual expression online, obstructs online sex workers’ labour rights and perpetuates sex work stigma. This article sheds light on how digital platforms can establish and maintain norms which regulate users’ online expressions, working conditions and representations.

Everybody wants some: Collection and control of personal information, privacy concerns, and social media use

As the utility of social media platforms for interacting with large populations, as well as understanding how they interact, becomes an increasingly interesting area, privacy concerns could present a barrier to engagement. This study employs a survey method to explore social media user frustrations with terms of service agreements and concerns over privacy and personal information shared on them. Findings support that concerns over control, collection, and access to personal information associate with decreased intensity of social media use and correlate to frustration with terms of service agreements regarding personal information use. Given the relationship between use and privacy concerns, leaving privacy concerns unaddressed might also lead to a reduction of use if these concerns continue to grow among users.

Too Long; Didn't Read: Finding Meaning in Platforms’ Terms of Service Agreements

It has become a common trope to note that online terms of service agreements are lengthy, obtuse, and universally ignored by the millions of users who bind themselves under these contracts every minute of every day. However, the enormous power that a handful of online platforms now wield over the global expressive discourse, power which is manifested through interpretations of the content standards laid out in these byzantine documents, has led to a growing focus on how these rules are set, modified, and interpreted. In the context of an ongoing debate around reform proposals to section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, this article argues for a model of contractual interpretation which limits the scope of protection available to platforms through the boilerplate exculpatory clauses in their terms of service agreements. The article justifies this position through a comparative analysis of the user agreements of the three largest platforms, to demonstrate a widening gap between the structure of the content policies and privacy policies on one hand, and the boilerplate terms of service on the other, arguing that this structural evolution supports the application of theories of contract and pseudo-contract to interpreting the terms of service.

Terms of service as a ground for establishment of ownership to virtual property

Problem setting. Today, the use of numerous sites is allowed only with the consent of the user agreements (Terms of Service) offered by them. Most often, users tick them, which is tantamount to signing such agreements, without even reading. However, it turns out that in most cases, user agreements, which are essentially agreements between users and providers, are aimed only at securing the interests of providers and in fact impose significant restrictions on users without granting them any rights other than the right to use the service. In addition, providers create them in such a way as not to draw the attention of users to the presence of the contract in this relationship. Such agreements are generally placed as hyperlinks at the bottom of the page or are created as a step that the user must agree to during registration. On this basis, the question of the need to strengthen the protection of users’ rights as a weaker party to the contract, by analogy with consumer protection, is increasingly raised. Moreover, the possibility of considering a user agreement as a kind of contract is widely discussed. Analysis of recent researches and publications. Given the novelty of such a phenomenon as user agreement, today there are not many studies devoted to them, especially in domestic science. Among foreign researchers of the legal nature and specifics of user agreements can be mentioned K. Cornelius, L. Belli and J. Venturini, T. Romm, P. Randolph, M. Radin, A. Savelyev, N. Vlasova. Thus, there is a lack of domestic research on the legal nature of user agreements, so there is an urgent need for research in this area. Target of research is to study the legal nature of the user agreement and analyze the possibility of it to become a ground for legal relationships, in particular, a ground for establishment of ownership to virtual property. Article’s main body. The article analyzes the possibility of considering user agreements as potential grounds for the emergence of ownership to virtual property. The judicial practice to protect the rights of users of accounts and European approaches to the protection of user rights are analyzed in the article. The research data, which give grounds to speak about violation of user rights by user agreements are given. In turn, this gives reason to question the possibility of considering the user agreement as a kind of contract. However, the analysis performed allows us to conclude that it is possible to consider the user agreement as a mixed contract, which can potentially serve as a ground for the emergence of virtual property rights. Conclusions and prospects for the development. Terms of Service agreements should be considered as mixed agreements that contain elements of several agreements. In particular, in the context of the emergence of virtual property rights from such agreements, elements of the Terms of Service agreement should be distinguished, which determine the legal consequences for the virtual property created within the online platforms. In the doctrine, the concept of virtual property as a kind of property right is already quite common today, and this kind of right may well arise from the contract, which in this case may be the Terms of Service agreement. If the Terms of Service agreement is recognized as the ground for the emergence of virtual property rights, it is necessary to provide in it how the balance of interests of platform developers and users in relation to virtual property will be determined. Obviously, all the features of the implementation and protection of virtual property rights, cases of its restriction will be specified in the contract.

We accept: the constitution of Airbnb

ABSTRACT This paper investigates the transformation of Airbnb as a platform for a more general reflection on the technological and technical constitution of domains, political platforms, and subjectivities. Part I explores the various (juridical and digital) technologies and techniques employed by the service provider to ‘fight discrimination and bias’, as well as to encode a world where everyone can ‘Belong Anywhere’. Part II draws on social systems theory and Gunther Teubner’s societal constitutionalism, rethinking the processes analysed in Part I in terms of auto-constitutionalisation. The auto-constitutionalisation of Airbnb, Part III suggests, instantiates the emergence of a new grammar of political action, epitomised by the Airbnb Terms of Service agreement, and a new generalisable mode of subjectivation: the standard formation of subjects.

Selling Your Soul on the Information Superhighway: Consenting to Services in Direct-to-Consumer Tele-Mental Health

Direct-to-consumer tele-mental health services—therapy delivered by video conference, email, and text message—is a burgeoning model of service delivery. The practice of on-demand digital psychotherapy presents ethical questions, as new economic models, service delivery systems, and therapeutic models are introduced. Virtual therapy, now offered on a subscription basis by third-party providers, requires users to accept Terms of Service (ToS) agreements to access services. This article describes the results of a survey in which participants ( n = 579) were asked to compare the values of the Human Rights Framework with the language of one tele-mental health platform’s ToS user agreement. Findings suggest that those clients with prior experience with a mental health professional will find the ToS agreements to be the most ethically compromised. Similarly, employed and better educated individuals also found the ToS to be ethically suspect. The most vulnerable of the groups we surveyed, individuals who hold less education and those who are unemployed, may be at most risk for signing consent to a system they do not understand. The study provides one example of the ethical questions that emerge from the introduction of a new model of for-profit service provision in mental health. Recommendations for consumers and practitioners are suggested.

Ethical problems in virtual research: Enmeshing the blurriness with Twitter data

When conceptualising knowledge gained from tapping into an internet data pool, one may question many things which can include the role of the researcher and the researched, privacy and ethics, intention, authenticity and the vastness of scope. The researcher, regardless of research intention including moral or ethical positions, must acknowledge that there are billions of nuances affecting online user participation. Ethical boundaries surrounding available data deemed ‘public’ in a program like Twitter, for example, are not easily wrapped in a terms of service agreement. Ethical problems in virtual research are expansive, and it is necessary to frame how and why researchers should address them. In the following paper, I outline some significant ethical issues in virtual research and address perceived pluralities as enmeshment. Drawing on Barad's ( 2007 , 2010 , 2014 ) theoretical model of diffraction, I poke holes through ethical blurriness and think through ethical possibilities for researchers, including online presence, data collection practices and participant agency.

Narrative, Design, and Comprehension: Connective Technologies and their Terms of Service Agreements

At present, one of the greatest challenges faced by privacy advocates is public awareness. In an era in which there are almost as many cell phone subscriptions are there are people on earth [1], the security of our personal information is an issue that impacts almost everyone both immediately and in the long-term. Yet the public appears resistant to changing behavior. This reluctance to be more vigilant with personal information is in large part due to the fact that the allure of digital networked devices outweighs the perceived potential risks to privacy and to the sanctity of our identifying data.

The barriers of Facebook's terms of service agreement: hardships placed on fiduciaries access to digital assets

The Stored Communications Act (SCA), as it stands now, creates an issue for fiduciaries accessing digital assets from cloud-based servers of deceased clients. The simple request of a decedent's Facebook information implicates several historical legal issues of privacy, ownership of content, and fiduciary rights, which all seem to muddy the already murky water created by the SCA. While much of this tangled area of the law is due to a failure to evolve the laws regulating an advancing market, some blame can be placed on service providers. Facebook and other service providers should update their terms of service (ToS) to put fiduciaries out of harm's way of criminal penalties, allow Facebook to voluntarily distribute materials to fiduciaries and give notice to account holders. The ToS agreements entered into are at the focus of this issue and are the easiest and fastest way to achieve clarity.

Do Consumers Read Terms of Service Agreements When Installing Software? -- A Two-Study Empirical Analysis --

An important issue in all transactions is the details of the agreement between the parties. This is particularly important in on-line transactions where consumers bind themselves to the detailed terms and conditions without reading them. This paper examines this from two perspectives. The first study reports what respondents self-report they do in terms of amount of time and amount of Terms of Service (TOS) agreements they read. The second study report actual observations of respondents as they “installed” software. The results show most respondents read very little of TOS agreements and the amount of time spent is less than one minute, making it impossible to actually read much of agreements that average over 6,000 words. The primary reasons for not reading TOS agreements are the length of the contract and the perceived cost vs. benefit of reading it, not the font size or legal language. Managerial and public policy implications are examined.

Tweeting to Totality: Critical Textual Analysis of Twitterrs Terms of Service

When afforded access and literacy, today’s public has the opportunity to engage in a whole terrain of mediated practices enabled by digital technology and the Internet, including varied forms of social media, user-generated content, and video streaming from over-the-top providers like YouTube and Hulu. In just about every one of these instances users have granted permission to the terms of use or service agreements, including their broadband provider, social media site, smartphone application and GPS service. Research suggests that consumers pay very little attention to such agreements and often bypass reading them completely if at all. But ironically, such terms of use and service agreements and their disclosure confer a bundle of rights and legal provisions to providers. In legalese, these arrangements generally take the form of non-negotiated contracts of adhesion and more or less define providers’ relationships with their users. Sociologically, arrangements such as these are completely social and thus warrant attention to the historical, cultural, social, political, and economic conditions that structures, maintains, and constrains the provider-user relationship.While much of the discussion on terms of use agreements focuses on the legality of such contracts, scholarship neglects just how comprehendible these agreements are for average laypersons. Even if a user takes the time to review these click wrap agreements, admittedly there is a high degree of jargon and verbosity that often obfuscates not only the reading but meaning of such terms of use or service. To help better illustrate these concerns this paper seeks to explore the following research questions: How do non-negotiated terms of use agreements effect the provider-user relation? Does the provider-user relationship, as influenced by non-negotiated terms of use agreements, resemble the power-prestige structure of a society? This paper thoroughly applies critical textual analysis to Twitter’s terms of service, rules and privacy policy. As one of the top five social media sites with 645 million users, Twitter represents a diverse demographic of adult online users in terms of gender, age, race, education, geographic location and income and serves as one of many examples of a widely used platform that requires users to consent to a terms of service agreement. Specifically, critical textual analysis is used to examine how these agreements structures the provider-user relationship to resemble the power relations and social inequalities typically found in a society structured by power and prestige. We argue that the non-negotiated contract or terms of agreement is neither mutually consensual or beneficial. Even though the Internet is celebrated for its decentralized structure, we illustrate that the social arrangement of the terms of use agreements is not democratic – but imperialistic and capitalistic. Within this vein, the words, content and context rendered in the terms of the contractual agreement are not typically understood by majority of users.

Consumer Legal Protections Against the Layers of Big Data

Much media attention over the past year has focused on the potential privacy implications of federal government national security and surveillance practices. Whereas, private entities appear to attract less scrutiny despite their increased involvement in data collection. Instead, consumers willingly agree to broad terms of service agreements that have implications on the use of their information for years to come. Moreover, market dominance by a few tech giants and their major acquisitions have arguably created information monopolies whereby single companies possess an array of user communication and data. Nonetheless, few federal consumer data protection laws exist to regulate the newly emerging big data industry. Now, even the White House is concerned about the amount of data amassed by the private sector.The consolidation of user data is often billed as a digital ecosystem in which consumers can seamlessly interact with their contacts and devices. However, seemingly-ambiguous terms of use create uncertainty over how information can be used not only today but also in the future. Thus far, such information has proved incredibly valuable for advertisers. Looking forward, big data can potentially shape consumption patterns while affecting now unknown privacy implications for consumers. Currently, user data is collected through the use of operating systems such as Android, in transit over wireless and wireline infrastructure provided by companies such as Verizon, to access social media sites such as Facebook. This “layered” data collection and transmission regime raises questions about the use and protection of consumer information.Existing research has primarily focused on the privacy implications of big data and its potential for misuse for surveillance purposes. This paper sets forth to answer the following research questions: What are the legal rights conferred in existing terms of use agreements? How are these terms of use agreements interrelated with one another within the layers of the Internet, ostensibly Internet access service (e.g. Verizon), operating systems and/or portals (e.g. Google), and content services (e.g. Facebook)? To explore these questions, this paper utilizes legal analysis and research to carefully examine the terms of use agreements of Google, Verizon, and Facebook. Upon understanding the rights within such agreements, this research focuses on judicial treatment of the broad terms in clickwrap agreements by which consumers transfer their data to large companies in addition to the statutory and administrative regulations of such agreements. Perhaps more importantly, this paper seeks to determine what limits are imposed on private companies’ use of consumer data within the multiple layers of the Internet. Existing privacy regulations will be reviewed to identify gaps and opportunities for improvement in an environment where arguably terms of use agreements are commingled together. To help illustrate this trend, the impact of the layers of big data will be discussed from the users’ perspective. This paper concludes by offering potential consumer remedies to safeguard privacy and big data concerns as well as suggestions to help provide greater clarity to terms of use agreements.

Defining Family: Representation and Rhetoric in the Marketing of Shared Mobile Phone Plans

In theory, the shared service plans referred to collectively by mobile providers in the United States as “family plans” promote a broad definition of what it means to be a family. While promotional imagery reflects traditional constructions of the family, based primarily on the presence of a child, terms of service state any group willing to enter into a financial agreement can sign up for the shared plan. In exploring the mobile service industry's construction of “the family” this paper argues we must go beyond the traditional semiotic approaches of critical advertising studies that focus primarily on images and instead consider promotional campaigns in their entirety. Through interviews with company representatives, analysis of promotional material and review of companies' terms of service agreements, this paper argues that the ambiguous definition of family reflects the broader tensions and ambivalence embedded in the term.

Consumer Privacy Choices, Informed Consent, and Baseline Protections to Facilitate Market Transactions in the Cloud

So many of our daily activities now take place “in the cloud,” where we use our devices to tap into massive networks that span the globe. Virtually every time that we plug into a new service, the service requires us to click the seemingly ubiquitous box indicating that we have read and agreed to the provider’s terms of service (TOS) and privacy policy. If a user does not click on this box, he is denied access to the service, but agreeing to these terms without reading them can negatively impact the user’s legal rights. As part of this work, we analyzed and categorized the terms of TOS agreements and privacy policies of several major cloud services to aid in our assessment of the state of user privacy in the cloud. Our empirical analysis showed that providers take similar approaches to user privacy and were consistently more detailed when describing the user’s obligations to the provider than when describing the provider’s obligations to the user. This asymmetry, combined with these terms’ nonnegotiable nature, led us to conclude that the current approach to user privacy in the cloud is in need of serious revision. In this Article, we suggest adopting a legal regime that requires companies to provide baseline protections for personal information and also to take steps to enhance the parties’ control over their own data. We emphasize the need for a regime that allows for “data control” in the cloud, which we define as consisting of two parts: 1) the ability to withdraw data and require a service provider to stop using or storing the user’s information (data withdrawal); and 2) the ability to move data to a new location without being locked into a particular provider (data mobility). Ultimately, our goal with this piece is to apply established law and privacy theories to services in the cloud and set forth a model for the protection of information privacy that recognizes the importance of informed and empowered users.

Public lives and private communities: The terms of service agreement and life in virtual worlds

This paper argues that the terms of service (TOS) agreements, also sometimes referred to as end user license agreements (EULAs), governing virtual worlds have important implications for the political and legal structures under which our virtual selves will function. This essay will focus on four key political concepts central to all TOS agreements studied. These concepts include contract language governing speech codes, intellectual property rights, privacy, and the relationship of the gaming world to the real world. If indeed these agreements offer governing constraints for people functioning in virtual spaces, then not only should their anti–democratic construction be considered, but as people spend more time in virtual worlds, these structures will become increasingly important to many aspects of our virtual identities.

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