New Service Offers Rankings For Photo Sharing Site Terms Of Service Agreements

New Service Offers Rankings For Photo Sharing Site Terms Of Service Agreements

TOSDR, or Terms Of Service Didn't Read, is a new online service that offers a report card style ranking of various website Terms Of Service agreements. The cleverly named website, which understands the usual approach user have to these agreements, has created a very easy to read summary of what we are getting ourselves into when we check that "I have read and agree to the terms" button.

There is a lot of heated debate among photographers about the various services we use to showcase and promote our work. In todays day and age, having an online presence is nearly a requirement, but navigating safely through all the options can be a daunting task. These TOS agreements are generally quite long and full of legal jargon that does more to confuse than to educate the end user.

It is with great pleasure then that I came across the Terms Of Service Didn't Read website. For those of us who are more visual learners, which I assume is the bulk of us here, the color coded grading system is a simple and effective way to browse the online photo sharing landscape. Furthermore, the service breaks down each TOS agreements details into nice and neat bullet points, which are also color coded to help you distinguish between the good and the bad.

This is a fantastic resource we should all reference and recommend.

Peter House's picture

Peter House is a commercial fashion photographer from Toronto, Canada. He shoots over 10,000 pieces of clothing every year for a variety of lookbooks. Clients range from small local boutiques to international brands such as Target, Winners, and Sears. In addition to that Peter runs one of the most popular rental studio's in the Toronto area.

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11 Comments

What I also find amazing is that that website has absolutely zero user/browser tracking cookies/scripts. Hats off to those who made that website.

Thanks for checking that out Tam! Great to know!

My Ghostery shows nine trackers, including DoubleClick, Gravatar, Facebook, Twitter, Google, New Relic on this page

Well we have ads (which pay for the free content you're consuming), share buttons (which honestly I don't like very much but the writers here do), and performance analytics.

Trust me, if it were up to me, we wouldn't be pulling code from Facebook nor Twitter. Nor would we have ads. But then someone has to pay for all the free stuff.

Sorry, Tam - I was not getting at you! I appreciate your work - I just wanted to make a point about the trackers. Keep up the good work!!

Trust me I think I hate trackers the most around here. I have Ghostery, uBlock, and also Privacy Badger.

Ihave Ghostery and µblock- must look for Privacy Badger as well :)

Didn't think 500px would score so low.

Why's that?

Stereotypically speaking they're Canadian so figured they'd be more trustworthy ;)

TOSdr was covered in 2012, and their last blog post was about a year ago. I wish they posted dates along with their ratings. Beware that this data may not be current.