VoIP Terms of Service May Surprise You

rabtech writes "If you are thinking of ditching a land-line for a VOIP provider such as Vonage or Net2Phone, you might want to think again. Software "End User license Agreements" have gotten a lot of attention in the past over their onerous and restrictive terms, but who would expect such things from your phone company? The prime example is Vonage, which states among other things that 'If Vonage, in its sole discretion believes that you have violated the above restrictions, Vonage may forward the objectionable material, as well as your communications with Vonage and your personally identifiable information to the appropriate authorities for investigation and prosecution and you hereby consent to such forwarding.'" (Read more below.)

"Don't forget the obligatory 'we can change these terms of service whenever we like and they become effective immediately when posted to our website.' Read for yourself here(1), here(2), and here(3). I won't put up with this kind of thing in my software and I certainly won't put up with it from my phone company!"

Comments

Money or privacy?

[jebilbrey]

I currently use Vonage, and I can tell you this. At $15 per month, I'm willing to give up a little to save money. Before Vonage I was paying $50+ a month for my local/long distance carrier. And that $50 only gave me a few added services. Now with Vonage I have every option service under the sun (three way calling, voicemail, caller id, etc etc.) I don't plan to do anything illegal, so if they share some info about me I'm not that worried. Then again, I wasn't aware that they had complete free reign over my informtion, so I do plan to write some letters asking them to change their policies. I think overall though, just like anything else, you have to weigh your own concerns over privacy vs cost and make a decision that works for you.

Re:Scary

[YouHaveSnail]

It does help to read more of the TOS than what's quoted in the /. summary. For example, the section leading up to the quoted part goes like this:

1.3 Lawful Use of Service and Device
1.3.1 Prohibited Uses
You agree to use the Service and Device only for lawful purposes. This means that you agree not to use them for transmitting or receiving any communication or material of any kind when in Vonage's sole judgment the transmission, receipt or possession of such communication or material (i) would constitute a criminal offense, give rise to a civil liability, or otherwise violate any applicable local, state, national or international law or (ii) encourages conduct that would constitute a criminal offense, give rise to a civil liability, or otherwise violate any applicable local, state, national or international law.

These are the 'restrictions' they're talking about. What they're saying here is that if you're using their equipment for criminal purposes, and if they know about it, they have the right to terminate your service, call the cops, and tell 'em what they know. I don't see how they have a lot of choice about this: if they did anything else, they'd open themselves up to all sorts of liability.

But it doesn't mean that they're going to monitor all your conversations or drop the hammer when you call your bookie. According to their privacy policy:

Vonage will not read, listen to or disclose to any third parties private e-mail, conversations, or other communications that are transmitted using Vonage services except as required to ensure proper operation of services or as otherwise authorized by law.

They also tell you in their privacy policy that they might use your data in ways you might not like: i.e. tell the cops who you are and where you live:

Vonage may use customer identifiable information to investigate and help prevent potentially unlawful activity or activities that threaten the integrity of service or network integrity or otherwise violate Vonage's Service Level Agreement.

This should come as no surprise to anyone, and any phone company would do the same thing. But what the phone company can (and must) do is well established in both our culture and our laws. Vonage, which for many purposes would probably prefer not to be considered a phone company, is offering a relatively new kind of service, and they really need to make these things explicit.

There's a lot of pressure on the FCC right now to regulate VOIP providers and make them make their networks easily tappable by law enforcement agencies. That's not entirely unreasonable... you don't want drug dealers and terrorists to have an untappable, portable, fast, cheap communications system with fixed cost long distance to boot.

Our role as citizens that have some understanding of the tech involved is to make sure our representatives know that for tapping purposes, law enforcement should treat VOIP just like POTS service. Essentially, they should have to jump through exactly the same hoops in order to get permission to tap VOIP that they do to tap POTS or cell service.