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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
http://www.btbroadbandvoice.com/ to be precise
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.
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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.
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.
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?