TOS Update: The Process for Signing and Now What?
by Read Holman
“I agree to these terms and conditions.” These words are right next to a box that you’re required to ‘check’ when creating a new account on any given 3rd party service such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and others. This is the infamous fine print that no-one really reads. No one, that is, but our lawyers, and it’s within this fine print that ‘terms and conditions’ exist which the federal government can’t agree to. Most of you know that this then requires some legal negotiations that culminate into an amendment to these terms of service agreements (TOS) that we must sign before moving forward.
We’ve signed 28 of these TOS amendments now, most recently with the Blackberry App World , MapBox , and Ustream . You can find the full list of these tools at our TOS page.
Here’s how the process works: GSA does the legal leg-work for us. They negotiate a federal-friendly amendment to a tool’s TOS agreement. HHS then has to sign and get a counter-signature from that company. These signed agreements then apply to the entire Department. Tools that are already on GSA’s TOS page are (most of the time) fairly easy for us to then get signed at the Department level.
But what about tools that haven’t been negotiated by GSA? For those, we contact the company ourselves and have our general council talk with their lawyers. As a starting place for these conversations, GSA has made the model TOS template for negotiating amendments.
I’ve received requests for many tools that fall into this category. Reaching out to the company; finding the right person to talk to; explaining to that person the issue at hand; and then having their legal team talk and work with ours... It has proven difficult, and… a lot of work with few results thusfar.
We recognize that TOS issues are an explicit hurdle that everyone faces in implementing new media technologies, and we hope that our addressing at the Department-level has proven the most efficient way to go. It is important to note that these agreements only address the legal barriers. Accessibility, privacy, security, and other concerns may persist, and those issues will need to be addressed upon each implementation of the tool in question.
While very big questions related to TOS are being discussed (such as: Why do we have to sign these if the Constitution recognizes Federal law superceding state law?), we continue to work with the different vendors to get legal barriers removed.
So now we have all these tools with legal barriers removed for implementation, and a new problem arises: What do they do?! Understanding best practices around each tools will take a village. Identifying and growing a network of those in the Department with experience with a give tool becomes an important component of building the collective wisdom of HHS.
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