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Hiding Your Choices And Saying You Made Them
An anonymous reader writes "Lawmeme's Paul Szynol describes how during installation RealPlayer hides checkboxes that elect that the user receives spam, making it look like the user chose to make the selections when in fact he probably just didn't see the options. "This is essentially a cheap and dirty marketing tactic which creates an illusion of informed acceptance by the user where no such acceptance really exists." Other people have posted similar examples from other applications. Is this illegal, or just annoying?"
Is this illegal, or just annoying?
Okay, I'll offer myself up as the sacrificial lamb and ask the obvious: Why would this be illegal?
Your email address is now 'a@b.com'. Despite what Trust-E has to say, Real has a history of ignoring privacy matters. I've never in the history of my using RealPlayers put in an actual email address, other than something with an @ and a .com in it. They can market to /dev/null all they like.
"There should be a law!!!" I hear it every day. I figure I'm in some socialist Green country, but then I realize I'm not. People are just unbelievable.
.001 font size, no it is not illegal. It is up to you to say "I won't sign this, and I won't use your product."
If someone gives you a contract in
If someone decides to "hide" some options down a scroll list, or maybe on a back page, it is still your responsibility to see if there is more, before signing it.
If they ask you to "Accept" a 40 page long list of rules and rights you are relinquishing, it is not illegal -- its just lazy of you to scroll through it all haphazardly and click "Agree!" You don't need their product, so close the window and say screw it. Follow up with a letter to their management, and if enough people complain, maybe things will change.
If you enter a fake e-mail address in, THAT might be illegal. Check the text to see. If anything, entering "OK" and moving on just gives the companies the knowledge that you agree (which you do by accepting their terms). Don't regulate these guys with LAWS, regulate these guys with MARKET tactics.
There should never be "consumer rights." I hate that term. YOU are not a consumer, and THEY are not a producer. You are BOTH market exchangers. They are exchanging their product for either your money, your e-mail address, or your personal information. You feel that any of those items you are exchanging is worth less than their product. This is true of ANY market exchange. You produce your cash, or your address, or your information, they product an item or a service.
There are no magic "economic" theories behind any of this. This is common Austrian School of Economics theory. It works. Go check out http://www.mises.org/ to learn more.
Consumers don't exist. Producers don't exist. We're both just equal partners accepting one person's services or products for the bartered exchange for another.
Keep the government out of it.
It does seem rather ironic that nowadays my firewall blocks more traffic coming from my own machine then from hackers on the net.
Yeah we do it hear it everyday. And it is a terrible thing to hear. At one end, we feel that the government is ultimately the only institution that can protect us from greedy and unscrupulous corportations, and at the other end we get tired of the government interfering in everything.
The law is becoming more and more important in our society. We are becoming an explicitly codified socieity. there are a lot of reasons this is the case. one of them, though, is that politicians need to get re-elected, and if they aren't passing new laws all the time, they are seen as not doing anything. for my part, i think that education, for example, has been reformed enough for a while. any statistician knows that you can't evaluate the results of some reform without ample time to evaluate it.
>Consumers don't exist. Producers don't exist. >We're both just equal partners accepting one >person's services or products for the bartered >exchange for another. agreed! except for one thing. we aren't equal in the larger scheme of things. your statement sounds more like a justification of the inequalities of the capitalist system than anything (actually, it sounds like you are saying they don't exist). But I won't say anything more, because I'm not familiar with the Austrian school of Econ. i will certainly go and learn more about it. ( :
as for Real Player? its not illegal, just shady, annoying, and we should write them and tell them that. and boycott. if they hid it in a way that you would have to hack into the program or install it first to see, then that would be illegal (hopefully)
madcapjack
Logic, macros, and more
Not only funny, but true! Most applications make it very easy to block their dishonest ways, though: ICQ, MSN, AIM, and YIM all use port 80 to download banner ads and upload. . . whatever it is they upload; while the actual message traffic is handled along other ports. Denying port 80 traffic to any application but the web browser is a reasonably good means of making sure you only send/receive the content you want to send/receive.
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
That's utter crap. It's right up there with "if you don't install an alarm, you deserve to be burgled and the burgler will be innocent" and "if you wear such a short skirt, you deserve to be raped"
To hell with you, troll.
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
My reading is that if there was an obligation, Real's tactic would, indeed, be illegal. People are comparing this to the "small print" in contracts. However, small print is clearly visible, and the intent behind it is to discourage people from reading it, rather than discourage them from believing that more information is available.
Here's a question. Suppose I gave you a sheet of paper, with a contract written on it. At the top is the space for the signature. The last clause on that paper was shown complete, and you read it, asked for a pen, and signed it. Could I get away with then enforcing clauses on "page 2" of the contract, that I never gave you, and quite intentionally avoided mention of, on the grounds that "The contract was two pages, if you'd just asked I'd have given you the second sheet". (Ok, so the dialog has a scrollbar with a bar positioned at the top, but the contract, for the sake of consistancy, has "Page 1 of 2" written at the bottom in small writing.)
I seriously doubt it, and I suspect any lawyer that tried such a trick would get disbarred. Despite the belief that law is all to do with loopholes and the ability to con people that many Slashdotters believe, and occasionally even think is right, words like "intent" and "mislead" and "reasonable" come up time and time again in courts, and are taken very seriously. If there is a serious, deliberate, and successful attempt to mislead someone into what the terms of a contract means, the contract is very rarely valid.
None of which has any bearing on this case because spam isn't illegal. As you say "Some people don't like immoral but technically legal tricks", but I'd say it's the spam, not the agreeing to it, that's the technically legal but entirely immoral thing going on here.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
This is insightful: The big difference is that it used to be quite clear when you were looking at a contract, and you knew you were supposed to take a good look at it (preferably with a lawyer). Now that contracts are masquerading as installation checkboxes (all the better to fool you with, my dear), All those End-User 101 students are suddenly flunking Advanced Installer Trickery without even realizing they'd been enrolled in the class.
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.