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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.
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).
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.
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.
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?