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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!"
I looked around for quite some time on a VoIP provider and eventually settled on callVantage. There are some annoying things (cannot run behind router, wants to be first machine in line, so I had to get a 2nd IP addy from the cable company) with using this, however, their ToS isn't as bad as most other VoIP providers. Plus, though they are a rather large phone company, they have pressure on them to make this work because of their regualer landline & corporate services. I'm sure they take liberties with this being unregulated, however, they will be more noticed and have more pressure should they screw up. So far so good, quality has been wonderful, hardly any cutout or breaky voices due to downloading a lot (slackware off bt). The modem they provide isn't half-bad, and I got to talk my wife into letting me get a 2nd DHCP address, which provides a few other advantages for me. Plus, its a good $30.00 cheaper then the local lec.
So don't do anything illegal. Be serious, look at any of the forums on http://www.broadbandreports.com/forum/voip regarding VOIP. Do you really think these companies have the time to keep up with monitoring your conversations and such when they barely stay afloat with user demand?
I'm glad that there are people out there willing to start a debate on what is acceptable or not in this regard.
What really bothers me is people who do not recognize that this is the cornerstone of democracy (a healthy debate).
Corporations have been writing licenses of this sort for a long time - some of the worst are the ones that come packaged with software or that are hidden in 1 pt. font on websites.
/. article on the subject.
They're a little dated, but for more information, check out these links at the Consumer Project on Technology:
UCITA
Questionable Licenses
And here's a link to an old
Slashdot | Questionable EULA's
> This -- as well as the potential long-term storage of all content that passes
> through Vonage's network -- is why I think it's crazy people are so gung-ho
> about unregulated 'phone' service. Just one more sacrificial lamb to the
> information economy.
Just one more reason to encrypt your phone calls.
http://www.btbroadbandvoice.com/ to be precise
He who gives up liberty for security deserves neither.
For security, I can understand why, but, to give up your rights for cheaper phone calls????
Well, assuming a 3 minute call... you can store voice data in about 8k/second. 3 * 60 * 8 = 1440... meaning the 'average' telephone call is going to take almost exactly one floppy disk to store.
Storage is somewhere around a buck a gig, so that means I could store a thousand average calls for about a buck.
Let's say that everyone in the country makes five 'average' calls a day. That's 250 million people, or about 1.25 billion calls a day.
In terms of just storage, archiving every one of those calls would probably cost about 1.25 million/day, or about 500 million a year. We spend that much in Iraq every couple of DAYS.
Now, there are going to be scaling problems with addressing this much data, and it wouldn't be this cheap, but if our government really wanted to do this, they *could*. It's feasible, although costly, to do TODAY... and in five years, it'll be a lot cheaper.
And look at it from a smaller perspective... if Vonage is handling a hundred thousand calls a day, they could easily archive an entire day onto ONE HARD DRIVE.
It's not nearly as tinfoil-hattish as you seem to think.
These pioneers exist on the forefront of legal boundaries. A few years ago there was debate about whether foreign countries selling goods over the internet were bound by laws at the point of purchase or the location of the vendor.
VOIP have the same problem of uncertain legal comeback. What happens if you're making a call to/through China, and Beijing wants to have a listen? A major international dispute could erupt, and these companies don't want to be caught in the middle. These laws haven't even solidied in any one country, let alone across borders
It's not that they want to be Big Brother, it's just if Uncle Sam comes asking, they've let you know that they could hand over the information.
If a Vonage conversation trapped a paedophile who was grooming children, that's a pretty darn good argument for handing over the evidence. Maybe [the tapping] not legal in some countries, but what about others?
People who know how to construct tin foil hats should use encryption, plain and simple.
[% slash_sig_val.text %]
With Vonage, the calls have a range of 30 kbps to 90 kbps. So to store the calls at 8k you would have to process those calls first. So then you're talking about having a ton of processing capacity before you store those "tiny" calls.
So if there is no processing then the storage increases (at least) by about a factor of 4 to nearly $5 million a day or $1.8 billion a year. That's a ton of cash to spend on something that may only have about 0.01% of "usable" information to the evil government.
And we're still not talking about the option to "down sample" the calls and what that would cost.
No no, if we want this sort of thing to stop, better to nip it in the bud before it becomes a culture.
You may think this just means co-operation with the police/FBI/CIA/NSA/etc, but the language is much, much broader.
For instance "in its sole discretion believes" could mean literally anything. Belief means anything and nothing. Do you believe in WMD?
Maybe Vonage - without any evidence - believe you look at children "the wrong way". Who knows? The language is so broad that this easily fits.
Then the language doesn't mention (although the choice of words implies) that this is about law enforcement. Maybe you offend their code of ethics, perhaps by violating with their newly minted condition about lewdness, harsh language or unpatriotic language.
Remember this is about personal phone calls, not a public forum. You may want to whisper sweet nothings to your other half. The nothings, sweet or otherwise, get forwarded to Vonage's opinion of an "appropriate authority" - say the Senate Committee on Public Morals - and you have "consented" to this.
T&Cs like this are an open invitation to abuse by idiological extremists, and there are plenty of those about ATM.
Once again a /. informant has become overzealous en route to forming a coalition of tinfoil-laden individuals.
Courts tend to take most EULAs with a grain of salt - they frown on "legally binding agreements" where one party can not alter the terms of the agreement. The main logic here is... let's say a corporation you're subscribed to offers a new service, and retroactively changes the TOS to abide by the rules applicable to that given service. Say that the added clause is, "our constituents, lessees of a service provided herein by Corporation X, are bound within contract to not breathe. Since you're subscribed to the service at the time of the change, it's implied that those who are in agreement with the terms thereto should stop breathing. But wait, did they have any say in the changes that were retroactively applied to a contract they signed years ago? Nope. It doesn't give people any choice, and, as a result, is not taken with much gravity.
Anyways... EULAs are crap. Even microsoft realizes that.
Your figures are so much higher than usual ISDN rates that I assume you actually mean bits per second, not bytes, which makes sense, a lot of the cheaper DSL connections would choke at outgoing rates of 90k-bytes-ps. I've always assumed Vonage compresses the streams rather than uses uncompressed streams, if I'm wrong and 90k-bytes-ps is a usual rate then I can only hope they're delivering your voice in full 5.1 14-bit stereo!
FWIW, GSM and CDMA both use codecs that deliver speech at about 1.4k-byte-/s, with cut down codecs that go as low as half of that. At the 1.4k-byte-ps rate, both are usually considered "land line quality" (though the mobile operators have a tendency to cut corners and use the lower rate codecs instead which is why it rarely feels that way.) I mention this because, as you can see, you can get very high quality calls into a much smaller stream than 8kbps.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
I totally agree with the parent regarding the recording aspect. It is my impression that this isn't any different than what is currently happening with land line phone companies though.
During a television interview with Patrick Norton on what used to be TechTV. The head of the NSA had revealed that following 9/11 various "Random" phone calls are being monitored, using a monitoring system that is triggered by keywords, that are used during the phone conversation.
On my VoicePulse line I get:
- Unlimited calling anywhere in SE PA and SW NJ
- Voicemail
- Enhanced Caller ID (I can assign personalized names to incoming numbers)
- Call Hunting (send call to cell if I don't pick up at home)
- Multi-Ringing (ring home, cell, and work all at the same time)
- Anonymous Call Block
- Telemarketer Block
- Call Filters (send call from mom to cell, send call from Joe to work)
- Distinctive Ringing
- Call Forward
- Three way calling
- 200 minutes long distance
for $14.99 a month. No taxes or fees are added on top of that, either.
The closest Verizon gets to this is their Metro Unlimited service which is over $45 / mo and I don't get ANY of the cool features that I do with VoicePulse (Plus, my "unlimited calling area" is about half the size of VP's calling area). When I add the features I get with VP, I'm close to $60 / mo.
$60 is much greater than $15... on the order of $540 / year greater.
Don't Bitch you say,
how often does anyone read the complete terms and conditions? bitching about them especially on places like slashdot is a useful service. It's not like you can type bad press and a company name into google and find out exactly where the agreement stitches up the user/subscriber
Bitch away and forewarn people of dodgy conracts before they sign one.
Blarney Quality Restaurant, Plants
This is why VoIP is suggested to be before your router. If it's the first thing conected to your DSL/CABLE it can decide how much of the bandwidth it needs and then let the rest of it pass to the rest of your computers. If it is after your router then it has to fight with all the rest of the gear for it's bandwidth. So far though even though I make it fight for it's bandwidth, it's never lost. Vonage is an undefeated bandwidth prize fighter. Of course my D-Link router is an excellent referee.
The comment has already been made. Let's move it along people. Nothing to see here.
If you dont break the law, you have nothing to worry about.
I am sure that they do not sit and listen and record content of calls all day long. They do however drop in from time to time to examine quality and misuse (misuse being defined as anyone who knowing tries to circumvent restrictions or steals access). Phone companies already do the same thing and have done so for years. I know, I have worked for one.
This "news" is simply more propoganda created by the makers of tin foil. Damnit they must be rich.
Are you intolerant of intolerant people?
I side with you but there's a legal squirrel in the whole business which comes from the 4th Amendment
I think the gov't and corporations are working together to redefine unreasonable. If everyone is subject to monitoring at all times, as evidenced by the universal acceptance of these usage agreements, then it's not unreasonable to be monitored.
Once everyone is subject to constant monitoring under the authority of the gov't then there's no longer any reason to question the validity or authenticity of evidence which the gov't brings against anyone. I forsee a society in which in may be your lottery luck to serve society as a prisoner, generating justification and revenue for the incarceration system, through no fault of your own. The evidence which convicts you will be collected through standard and reasonable monitoring.
+++ATHZ 99:5:80
with the use of the vocorder principle (wich is very old indeed) you can get voice down to 60 BYTES PER SECOND or so.,
.,
:)
say, you need to encode 3 frequencies to get intelligible voice (most simple voice synhesizers dont use more than 3 tones to generate speech so 3 analisys bands seems ok)
and you use one or two bits for encoding noise.,
and if you assume the brain accepts aural information maybe 20 times a second or so.,.,
then you could encode the frequencies of the lowest 3 bands of the voice with just 3 bytes (intelligible voice has a very limited bandwidth so you can easily encode that frequency in just one byte)
just an idea.,
but 60 bytes per second, people!,.
ooh, and dont forget about magnetic tape as a storage medium.,., you can put A LOT A LOT of calls on an analogue tape,
this is because of our brains capability to pick out information from very dirty sources (like noise and flutter and stuff)
so they make the tapes spin realy slowly and can record about an hour of lo-quality audio on an inch of tape., (not sure exactly tho)
greets.,
aka.,
Two problems - first many carriers are starting to use VoIP on the backbone or even offering local VoIP service, so if you're paranoid about Vonage why not be paranoid about AT&T or MCI?
Second, think TDM circuit are never monitored? Think again. The CO will, on occasion, tap into DS1 and DS3s to test for the integrity of the signal, especially on circuits that are showing errors. And I do mean covert them to analog and listen in. How do I know? I've worked in those environments. They listen for static but it is your call.
But wait - there's more. Say the FBI has a murder suspect and you are the gf of the murder suspect. With a court order I can record your calls, give records of all calls in last x months, etc.
So the TFB bunch better get bigger hats. If you are afraid that they store your contents you have to worry about the major carriers too.
Vonage and the others are not out there to listen in anymore than the RBOCs are. They are there to make a buck. And the only way to do that is to provide reliable service (ahem, try?) not to listen into your calls. There are problems and weaknesses in VoIP but lets not create FUD for those things that are no better or worse than traditional POTS lines.
--- Tolerance is the axiomatic "virtue" of those without convictions ---
Short, over-simplified answer:
Someone thought about this a while back, and came up with something called Quality of Service (QoS). This has little or nothing to do with service quality, as the name suggests, but is rather a way to prioritize packets. VoIP packets generally get priority over other packets because voice is more sensitive to delay and packet loss.
When your connection approaches your maximum bandwidth, packets are dropped. Ideally, your call would not be affected, as the packets being dropped would be the 'other' packets -- file transfers, web pages, etc, etc.
"Mandatory Arbitration. Any dispute or claim between End User and 8x8 arising out of or relating to the Service or Equipment provided in connection with this Agreement shall be resolved by arbitration before a single arbitrator administered by the American Arbitration Association in accordance with its Commercial Arbitration Rules . The arbitration shall take place in San Jose, California and shall be conducted in English. The arbitrator's decision shall follow the plain meaning of the relevant documents, and shall be final and binding. Without limiting the foregoing, the parties agree that no arbitrator has the authority to: (i) award relief in excess of what this Agreement provides; or (ii) award punitive or exemplary damages. Judgment on the award rendered by the arbitrators may be entered in any court having jurisdiction thereof. All claims shall be arbitrated individually and Customer will not bring, or join any class action of any kind in court or in arbitration or seek to consolidate or bring previously consolidated claims in arbitration. CUSTOMER ACKNOWLEDGES THAT THIS ARBITRATION PROVISION CONSTITUTES A WAIVER OF ANY RIGHT TO A JURY TRIAL."
What we need is to _REMOVE_ all the protecting legislation which is supposed to protect us but, because of monetary fact, only protects corporations.
It might well be better to get rid of the semi-personhood status of corporations. Either go back to their being something other than "people". Or treat them entirely as "people", including being jailed if they break the law and subject to compulsary medical treatment if they are diagnosed as insane...