> "... it is their own responsibility to read the T&Cs of those services."

While some people may believe/feel this is reasonable, it has rapidly become impractical. Have you read the T&CS for all the services you use? Any idea how many pages of text that comes to? Did you also know that the reading level of most T&Cs requires college-level education (just to comprehend)?

My point is that it is already impractical (& will become more so) to suggest that T&Cs can make people aware of anything.

I used to read them, then sift through them. Then I gave up. My defence would go along the lines of: you don't seriously think that any end user would read that, would you? (Exceptions for APIs etc.)

Same goes for legal disclaimers in email footers, cookie warnings, warning stickers etc. Why are we allowing this to happen?

(My solution: "Yes, you can sue them because the coffee was hot (etc) and there was no sticker on it, you just have to be prepared to give up your voting rights and your drivers license in the progress. Continue Yes/No?")

As an aside, the "coffee was hot" lawsuit wasn't as frivolous as people make it sound. See Liebeck v. McDonald's Restaurants for details.

Anytime someone says that lawsuit was frivolous, I lose a bit of respect for them.

Their privacy statement is short and clear:

https://jawbone.com/legal/privacy

~1400 words.

I liked this section:

When you use the Jawbone Companion app we connect with and upload to our servers the address book and calendar on your device along with other data that we normally collect through our mobile apps described in the app usage data section below.

I wonder how calendars are used.

I can't tell if you were being serious. Assuming you were, then 1400 words, presented as a wall of text, is an anathema to the short attention spans of many users. In addition, that 1400 words is a subset of around 5400 words for the Terms and use of software/services.

We can debate whether people should be educating themselves about such terms but my point is (still) that it's impractical in the long term as we want to use more services/devices. The only way out of this that makes sense to me is that people begin owning their data and (digital 'exhaust'). I'm working on FOSS tools to enable this (see my profile).

Yes, I was serious. It's a $80 dollar device that you wear a significant amount of time. In that context, 15 or 20 minutes spent understanding what it does is not onerous.

Note the comment I made earlier in another part of the thread where I said I pretty much refuse to use device+service combos like the one here.

In that case, I'm curious whether you use a smart phone (iOS/Android) and whether you've read all those documents too. That's typically a much higher-value product.

Also, recall that I said that a certain level of knowledge/understanding is required to even understand the basics.

> "I pretty much refuse to use device+service combos like the one here."

Could you elaborate why? Onerous T&Cs? No control of data? Don't care about such analytics?

My problem with how things are developing is that we end up in a world where either you resign yourself to the fact that you're constantly being data-mined or you become a digital hermit. There's very little that allows you to engage and retain control (without becoming a sysadmin).

I have an Android tablet, but not a smart phone. I'm not hugely careful with what I stick on there, but I think I've only shared my contacts with stuff like Hangouts and Skype (where the explicit purpose of the app is to contact people). I increasingly leave my cell phone sitting at home (mostly because I don't care about being reachable, not because I'm worried about network location pings). I take it with me if I'm going to be away for more than a couple hours.

As far as not using analytics, it's a combination of not caring (as an example, I run (maybe I should say jog?) regularly but don't time myself) and distaste over the way the data is managed.

The fact that people's views of their privacy rights are subjective means that a lot more than 1400 words would be necessary to cover every single action that at least one human perceives to be a privacy violation.

Maybe there should be regulated permissions, sort of like the way an OS might have a dialog to request permissions for push notifications or location data.

Example, you can still include any terms you want but some items need to be individually agreed to in plain language, like "This product will report your location back to us"

Sort of like FDIC notices or nutrition facts.

That is a good point - it is quite difficult to read and interpret all these sets of T&Cs these days. Something should be done to make these more accessible / standardised.

However, that is a problem that is equivalent across all facets of all services people use, and I think is independent from this problem.

The likelihood is that most people don't read the T&Cs and most people don't care about their data being used like this. But if someone is concerned about a particular facet of a service (privacy/data usage) then there is a place they can look and relatively easily find out what they need before signing up.

What can be done about the wider problem of T&Cs and how they are unwieldily is a tough one.

> Have you read the T&CS for all the services you use?

No, but if I personally thought that practices which are extremely commonplace (like the collection of anonymous data) were privacy violations, I probably would read the T&Cs. Unfortunately, I would also be unable to use the vast majority of electronic products, including virtually all websites.

And has anyone seen the notice "This site uses cookies" and said "aw shucks"?

And if they do, do they also continue using the sites that don't have to tell you about their cookie policy?

I still believe it's reasonable because once you've read one, you've read them all. They all pretty much say the same thing. Jawbone doing this or Facebook experimenting with the feed should not come as a surprise to anyone who has skimmed over a TOS.

> "They all pretty much say the same thing."

This is not a safe approach when you're dealing with legal contracts, which is what T&Cs purport to be. Minor difference in wording can have very different intents/outcomes.

Having said this, they pretty much give carte blanche to the service provider to do whatever they want -- so in that sense, they're all the same.. That doesn't make it right and it doesn't mean it can't/won't be contested at some point.