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posted by fyngyrz on Wednesday April 11 2018, @09:38PM   Printer-friendly
from the that-really-zucks dept.

Submitted via IRC for fyngyrz

Senator Kennedy of Louisiana confronted Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg about the transparency of the social media company's policies on Tuesday.

[...]

"I'm going to suggest you go home and rewrite it, and tell your $1,200 dollar and[sic] hour lawyer...you want it written in English not Swahili, so the average American user can understand," Kennedy said.

Source:
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/10/senator-to-zuckerberg-your-user-agreement-sucks.html


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  • (Score: 1) by Sulla on Wednesday April 11 2018, @09:49PM (10 children)

    by Sulla (5173) on Wednesday April 11 2018, @09:49PM (#665567) Journal

    I think the problem here is that the average American can't speak Swahili. I suggest that the American education system change to be more welcoming of companies who want to write illegible user agreements.

    --
    Ceterum censeo Sinae esse delendam
  • (Score: 5, Touché) by bob_super on Wednesday April 11 2018, @10:04PM (8 children)

    by bob_super (1357) on Wednesday April 11 2018, @10:04PM (#665578)

    More seriously:
      >written in English not Swahili, so the average American user can understand

    It IS written in English. Maybe you should stop cutting school funding, and get all the benefits of an educated population.

    • (Score: 5, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday April 11 2018, @10:19PM (7 children)

      by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday April 11 2018, @10:19PM (#665586) Journal

      Actually, the senator makes a good point. Documents written in legalese really aren't all that very "English".

      Let's remember that the purpose of communication is to transfer ideas between people. The purpose of legalese is to mask and disguise the intent of the person(s) who wrote the document. Legalese intentionally obscures meaningful communication.

      • (Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 11 2018, @10:31PM (3 children)

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 11 2018, @10:31PM (#665591)

        Wrong.

        Legalese is actually almost its own language, but the reason it is so obtuse is that the wording is VERY specific such that small grammatical changes can drastically alter the meaning behind a contract. It actually has to be burdensome otherwise any lawyer could argue that their client interpreted the contract a different way and thus it is non-binding. It would be nice if they were required to provide a human readable version that covers 90% of the entire EULA.

        • (Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Wednesday April 11 2018, @10:50PM

          by fustakrakich (6150) on Wednesday April 11 2018, @10:50PM (#665604) Journal

          Legalese is actually almost its own language

          Let's be grateful it isn't Java!

          You know, for all the precision 'Legalese' claims to have, it sure is open to wildly variable interpretations, the winner being the most expensive. What we have is accounting, not law.

          --
          La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 12 2018, @12:03AM

          by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 12 2018, @12:03AM (#665640)

          They call it a code of laws. Keyword being code.

          You do need a secret decoder ring to decipher it. It can be found without a JDL. Hidden in a slew of paralegal frameworks.

        • (Score: 2) by frojack on Thursday April 12 2018, @12:04AM

          by frojack (1554) on Thursday April 12 2018, @12:04AM (#665642) Journal

          otherwise any lawyer could argue that their client interpreted the contract a different way and thus it is non-binding

          Easily solved.

          Include the boilerplate.
          And also include the Gloss.

          Written by the same company's people.

          --
          No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
      • (Score: 0, Offtopic) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Wednesday April 11 2018, @10:35PM

        by MichaelDavidCrawford (2339) Subscriber Badge <mdcrawford@gmail.com> on Wednesday April 11 2018, @10:35PM (#665592) Homepage Journal

        The list moderator's take on this here essay of mine was to force moderation of all my subsequent posts:

        Makefiles as G-d and Nature Intended Them [warplife.com].

        tl;dr: To use ./configure is just like being sodomized by supersonic telephone poles.

        --
        Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
      • (Score: 2) by darkfeline on Friday April 13 2018, @07:38PM (1 child)

        by darkfeline (1030) on Friday April 13 2018, @07:38PM (#666602) Homepage

        Have you tried actually reading a legal document?

        They are written in English. Just because many people find it difficult to read, does not make it "not very English". Maybe that's a testament to how poorly educated most people are, or how lazy most people are, but these documents are written in English, plain English, and if you can read English, you can read legal documents.

        They may require more effort to read, for example, they may be closer to a translated copy of Count of Monte Cristo than Garfield or anything else in the Sunday comics, but it's regular English that any competent reader of English should be able to read.

        --
        Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
        • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Friday April 13 2018, @07:54PM

          by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Friday April 13 2018, @07:54PM (#666607) Journal

          Oh-kay. You get a point for that. But, only if you'll admit that the Bible is also written in English, and that any literate person should understand the Bible. Or, at least, the King James Version, which is pure English.

          We will most likely agree that the US Constitution is written in very clear English, yet we have ongoing controversy over the meanings of quite clear meanings of our Bill of Rights.

          In cases of corporate disputes over contracts, copyrights, patents, and other IP, it takes teams of lawyers months, and even years, to establish what those various contracts actually mean, and/or what the law states regarding the IP dispute.

          If SCO, IBM, and a myriad of legal professionals wasted all those years trying to determine who properly owns precisely which rights, what hope does the average layman have? They typical high school grad - or worse, a high school dropout - has little chance of wading through that legalese. I'll go further - the typical college grad doesn't have much hope. There is a "gotcha" hidden somewhere in that contract. If your degree is in law, your chances are a helluva lot better than the high school dropout, but still - there is a "gotcha", and you've got to find it before you can give informed consent.

  • (Score: 2) by Fnord666 on Thursday April 12 2018, @01:45AM

    by Fnord666 (652) on Thursday April 12 2018, @01:45AM (#665691) Homepage

    I think the problem here is that the average American can't speak Swahili. I suggest that the American education system change to be more welcoming of companies who want to write illegible user agreements.

    IIRC there is no written form of the Swahili language, so it probably wasn't literally written in it.