Slashdot Mirror
Apartment In US Asks Tenants To 'Like' Facebook Page Or Face Action (business-standard.com)
An anonymous reader writes from a report via Business Standard: An apartment building in Salt Lake City has told tenants living in the complex to "like" its Facebook page or they will be in breach of their lease. Tenants of the City Park Apartments said they found a "Facebook addendum" taped to their doors last weekend, asking them to "like" the City Park Apartments Facebook page. The contract says that if tenants do not specifically "friend" City Park Apartments on Facebook within five days, they will be found in breach of the rental agreement. In addition, the contract includes a release allowing the business to post pictures of tenants and their visitors on the Facebook page. Currently, the apartment building has a 1.1 star rating on its Facebook page.
IIRC, that's a violation of Facebook's Terms of Service. Please report it to Facebook, and if enough people corroborate the report, the business in question won't have a page anymore.
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Like us on facebook... Or ELSE, you bastards!
If it is in the lease, then OK. Bizarre but still not the stupidest thing that I've heard today.
If it ain't in the lease then the apartment landlords can fuck right off.
So what's the name of the Apartment Complex?
So, you know. We can report this to FB. And publicly shame them. And all that.
You can tell how powerful someone is by the magnitude of the crime they can commit and be able to get away with.
apartment = a terrible and possibly mentally hellish place, that no one should ever have to "live" in. Fuck them , never again,
Like or Friend are different. You can like a page or friend a person - the latter giving way more stalking potential.
I'd attach an addendum on the front door of the leasing office, saying either my rent is half-price from now on, or I'll "take an action" in that nice flower pot they have sitting there.
I had a landlord state if I did not indemnify them for $xm I would be charged a monthly fee equal to my rent. A judge upheld it as "sufficient notice". A MTM rental agreement has zero protection to the tenant.
https://www.ksl.com/?sid=39954...
Article references original source...
-- "Oh. This guy again."
A rather twisted way to take the page offline for good, but it worked...
Believe it or not there are some people in the world that don't actually have Facebook accounts.
There are now several kinds of "like." I would use the Hilarious icon.
Reminds me of the ol' prank memo: "The beatings will continue until morale improves!"
Table-ized A.I.
This has been retracted by the apartment company.
https://www.facebook.com/mande...
Toil is Stupid. Don't be Stupid.
It's not his fault that "City Park Apartments" has such a generic name and wesn't set off with quotation marks as one resource I looked at mentioned things that do not normally stand by themselves should.
If the Apartments in question tied somebody's job and/or bonus to the number of likes. Having worked my share of crappy customer service positions where I was given unreasonable performance metrics you'd be surprised some of the... creative ways folks will come up with when they get desperate to meet them. After 40 years of stagnate wages and 6% rent inflation a "bonus" is practically part of your salary...
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This would be a highly effective way for a pissed-off tenant to make their landlord look very, very bad...
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
This is basically changing the terms of a rental tenancy agreement while the lease is still in effect, and will not be met without penalty for the landlord.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
"Join us... or die."
The "Civilized World" jumped the shark ca. 1973.
Commence operation: Rake over coals.
So they can decide if you continue to meet their (stick-in-butt) standards, in my opinion.
Also in my opinion, they can go fsck themselves.
Hopefully all current tenants sue the crap out of them. Damn I wish I lived there.
And that they would be willing to be forced to expose their private "friends only" facebook lives to all tenants of the apartments.
Yeah, didn't think so.
Dear Facebook employees who are cool & geeky enough to be reading Slashdot,
Maybe you could just disable their account for violation of TOS?
That would be fantastic. Thanks!
Oh look. Not renting is better again.
Here's a cache if anyone is interested. The official page is gone now, no telling if they pulled it or FB did. Gawker has more info, including part of the new clause that says “to not post on any public forum or page negative comments relating to the community.” While it may not be strictly illegal, it would be found discriminatory against those who don't have a Facebook account, internet access, etc. The quoted lawyer mentions this; it might violate other laws too; but it would be trivial to show in court that this is discriminatory against the elderly etc who don't use computers, have a Facebook account, etc. It's not technically a "free speech" issue, since it's not a Government agency forcing this..and at this time the only "free speech" restrictions are the Government, a private corp can do whatever it wants inside it's contractual agreements. Utah, and Salt Lake, might have additional "tenet laws" that might restrict them.
However, IANAL
burn the building down and kill the owners. everyone wins.
City Park Apartments The old address was at 764 N 900 W, this one is at 780 N 900 W. But it's been around for quite some time. However, the "missing one" was marked "unofficial" so perhaps this is the "official" page.
class action lawsuit to me, a lawyer ought to be able to rip that apartment manager & owner a new one
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
http://img.ksl.com/slc/2591/259185/25918548.jpg
Note that clause 5 is an indemnification clause. (If you don't know that that means, learn)
BS. A business exists, because it provides service, that people are willing to pay for. It does not need "society's permission".
Statist much?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
It has exactly one month protection for both tenant and landlord. If that's not enough for you, sign a longer lease...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
...in addition to FB's new Like button options, can they add a "Like through clenched teeth" button? When people click on it, they should simply appear as regular "Likes" to the FB account holder (or anyone with the same IP address) but as "Like through clenched teeth" to everyone else. How about it? Can we petition Mark Zuckerberg to implement it?
Oh, I'm sure this will work out splendidly for City Park Apartments. What could possibly go wrong?
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Obviously, the landlord is an idiot, and your best choice is not to rent there.
"I really like City Park Apartments. The amenities are nice and the neighbors very accommodating.
- Signed Mr Cockroach, using Anon's Facebook account while he's asleep."
Have gnu, will travel.
Beware of sentient buildings!
Be Careful What You Ask For :: We had a business do something similar in my area. It beyond backfired on them. There was a huge protest but the company forced them to like them (Facebook, Yelp, etc.). Time goes by and everyone started posting negative comments, negatives about management, and how bad the service was. So much negative stuff was posted that eventually it got out in the wild and other people that knew of the company started doing the same negative postings. It got so bad that the company started begging people to STOP and started to pay people to STOP. They lost 96% of their business and had to close.
----again be careful what you ask for----
Only in the US
There is a place where you can have your say as a Tenant, so you can share your experience with no censure.
It's called "What the Flat"
http://www.wtflat.com/
Five minutes attention span? Next you're going to tell me you expected Obama to make a difference, and that Hilary can...
Take your order prease!
I'm not a US citizen, so the law relating to tenancy is likely quite different from the State in this story, but perhaps the principles are similar.
It seems highly unlikely (conceded, we don't know all the relevant facts in this case) the the landlord would have written their own tenancy agreement without some form of legal support. For one thing, the landlord would have wanted/needed to ensure that they had adequate protections in case a tenant turns out to be a criminal (say drug dealer), or causes damage to the property - that sort of thing. So let's give the landlord the benefit of the doubt and assume they consulted a lawyer on that tenancy agreement...
If that lawyer was worth their salt then they would have told the landlord that they would need to be consulted before making changes to the agreement, that it was not possible to make unilateral changes to the agreement and impose them on existing tenants without the agreement of those tenants. So whilst, in this case, the landlord is rightly being castigated for an ill-thought-out idea, it's possible the trouble runs even deeper.
Then again, as a friend of mine quips in the face of stories like this: "Always bet on stupidity - the odds will be in your favour."
Every time I read one of those "must not make bad comments about us" demands I have to think of that old joke from Stalinist times where a person was sent "away" and knew that his letters would be censored, so he told his wife that he'd write everything that's true in blue ink, everything that wasn't in red. And when the first letter came it read, all in blue:
"Dear Natasha, everything is great here. Good food, easy work, nice people and we are all in great health. It is so great here that I can honestly say, my biggest problem here is actually just that we have no red ink."
The joke's pretty well known around here, to the point where the saying "only problem: No red ink" has become the "coded message" for when you can't talk as you wish. We need something like that for cases like this.
And yes, it's kinda sickening that we have to learn tactics from Stalinist times to communicate today...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
My Roommate Agreement needs this addendum. Will post it to his door ASAP.
I searched for "City Park Apartments" and see a bunch of bad reviews mentioning the forcing of Facebook likes, but the City Park Apartments is listed as being in Florida when the Slashdot summary states Salt Lake City....
Facebook is not a professional service. No real business should be attempting to do business or rely on facebook pages or ratings.Would you run your business from Myspace or Google+? No.. they are socializing profiles and closing to dating sites than anything a business should want.
Anytime I find a business trying to use Facebook as their web presence instead of having a professional webpage. I assume they suck, and usually they do. Only amatuar business should have Facebook and other social media webpages and this is just because they can't yet afford or know they can afford a real webpage.
I realize the Facebook page is a good deal for functionality at no cost, but it's not free. It's a data mining operation with ads. It's not a place you host a business website and all the ratings and commenting are just generally bad for business.
Businesses should be focused on Google and superpages,yellowpages. Those are were the hits come from and that's were most people with money with be doing business. The upside for customers is that it takes a tad bit more brainpower to not just setup a Facebook company.
If your business has a website. FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, don't make a Facebook, Twitter, Linkden profile for it. Just focus on your own domain and webpage and Google, Superpages and other top BUSINESS listings. Nobody goes to Facebook and looks up apartments or electricians. Why would you want to be hosted there? Just to attract the dumbest trolls possible to your business?
Unless your in some type of viral marketing or an entertainer, you have no business being a company on a silly entertainment site like Facebook.
The apartment complex I have lived at for over 8 years now once asked tenants to submit positive reviews on an apartment rating website. There were no threats or b.s. about it being in rental contracts, just an honest call for some reviews to try and boost their ranking after a disgruntled individual had opened several fake accounts to push their rating below where it had historically been. Only a handful of tenants bothered to submit reviews but they were at least honest about some of the downsides to the place and the rating went back up to where it had averaged before. If you take the time to read many of the reviews that are out there for apartments you will begin to notice patterns that clearly indicate someone hit financial difficulty then got bitchy about management not letting them live there for free, or people that have mental health issues and can't deal with the slightest noise during the daytime. Then, of course, there are the racists that assume any person of color is on Section 8 and somehow responsible for any and all litter or crime in their neighborhood. Heaven forbid someone have young children.
-==- Buy a Mac and leave me alone!
If I had been wanting to leave but couldn't due to a lease I would jump on this as a change I didn't accept and get out of there. I would hold the complex to 30 days notice however.
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
Reminds me of a similar story. In Provo, in order to house BYU students, an apartment complex must be "BYU approved". They only approve the whole building, not individual units, so basically, every building in Provo is BYU approved, because otherwise they'd be at a serious disadvantage getting tennants. One of the requirements of being "BYU approved" is that the Honor Code staff can inspect your apartment at any time for violations.
So, a guy who is not a student at BYU, comes home one day to find a picture he had on his wall, of a girl wearing a bikini, had been taken down. The morality police at BYU were unapologetic. He violated their code, in their town.
Imagine people with that mentality. They wouldn't think twice about requiring you like them on Facebook.
What surprises me is that no one seems surprised that anyone would be so obsessed about getting "likes". Just goes to show how common this mania is nowadays. I'm always a bit shocked at how far people go to get you to say something positive about them on social media, whether they're begging for "likes" or hounding you to review your transaction. I sold something on eBay recently. The guy sent me the money, and I sent him the item. End of story. We had no communication. Yet, I was compelled (by eBay) to "say something" about it. Just marking it "positive" wasn't good enough. God help you if you say anything negative!
I bought a simple item online recently. The company sent me five emails, asking me to "review the product". No news is good news, I want to tell them.
Now, would you kindly take a moment to mod up my comment? Thank you!
-- sudon't
Air-ride Equipped
I like this statement from the Salt lake City newspaper...
Zachary Myers, an attorney who specializes in tenant rights for Hepworth, Murray & Associates in Bountiful, said the contract addendum may not be fair to those who don’t have or are unable to create Facebook accounts.
“The biggest issue that I have with it is that it seems to be discriminatory against elderly individuals and disabled individuals who are unable to utilize an online presence such as Facebook,” he said.
I am not elderly or disabled, I have been involved in computers and the internet heavily since the early 90's, it is how I make my living, my career, and spend a lot of my free time. I just do not use Facebook and have no real interest in it. No deep philosophical reasons, I just don't care to follow what people are doing in that way.
As another AC pointed out, he isn't just making things up out of thin air. But let's suppose he is. So? Why can't he make up his own definitions?
You can make all the definitions you want so long as you first ensure that others understand them. In Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass, Humpty Dumpty claims that his words mean whatever he chooses them to mean, which causes Alice some confusion. Sometimes the reader can guess the definition you're using because it makes sense; sometimes it doesn't. For example, if you look at an egg-shaped character and call his arms "legs", so long as they behave like legs, the reader can infer the sense via duck typing. But because most of us don't walk that way (with some exceptions), calling arms "legs" might need some explanation.
Let's look at another example inspired by Edward Josiah Stears' Notes on Uncle Tom's Cabin:
If you call a tail a leg, how many legs does a kangaroo have? Five. If you call a tail a leg, how many legs does a moo cow have? Four.The difference is that unlike a cow's tail, a roo's tail fulfills a role that speakers associate with the ideal of a "leg". In particular, a roo's tail is weight-bearing during pentapedal walking and during kicks when boxing. A cow's tail isn't weight-bearing. So if you want to "call a tail a leg" without confusion, you have to make clear to readers what the definition is and how it is useful.
The Gates foundation have done billions of times more good than I ever could. Their capacity to do good is magnified by their vast financial resources. [...]
But while humans do both good or evil corporations can only ever do evil. They are fundamentalky designed by law to preclude the capacity to ever do sincere good.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is a non-profit corporation with charitable tax status. Even among for-profit entities, the benefit corporation is a type of corporation that incorporates good into its charter.
The government's role is to protect me from violence and help me enforce fair contracts.
Does trespass to real property count as "violence"?
And how is it working out for you? When a business needs government's permission to offer you their service?
Presently, cities tend to own roads, which gives them a claim against unauthorized utilities under trespassing law. Or under your preferred society, who would own the roads?
Some cities enact sit/lie laws, which force residents to either buy or lease real property to live on rather than buying a tent and temporarily occupying a common area. So if the choice is to either A. comply with the landlord's speech limits or B. get evicted for speaking and then go to jail for violating the sit/lie law, then the sit/lie law is effectively an abridgment of freedom of speech.
Apartment complexes try stunts like this all the time. But...
The lease is the only thing you are obligated to comply with. Addendum's have no legal power unless you agree to it, and to do so mid way through a lease... The Apartment owner is out of luck.
Even if they add it to a lease that you sign at the beginning of the year, you could talk to an attorney, and likely get a judge to rule it as unconscionable, which would nullify that part.
I would say this is mostly coercion and you may have a legal case on that alone.
I wonder if this scenario will happen? Don't like your companies page, then you will have to be let go.. You work at McDonald's and don't like the McDonald's page? then time to move on.. There is a fine line between supporting your product and being forced to support it.
And that they would be willing to be forced to expose their private "friends only" facebook lives to all tenants of the apartments.
Yeah, didn't think so.
Yeah, I think I might like to chat up some of their teenage daughters. Just sayin'.
Would be interesting to see all the tenants unlike - unfriend, give a 0 or negative rating if possible and then wait for the "action"
Then once there was action then they should file a class action... and let those pesky excuses for landlords squirm out of that one....
Communication requires both speaker and listener to understand each other.
silentcoder was using a "philosophical" definition. Apparently the "philosophical" definition has some history to it, and not part of some personal theory of his written on a napkin somewhere. So he's not being Humpty. He's being Jules Winnfield assuming that Brett can understand some motherf-ing English.
Except when there was a confusion, silent didn't shoot the guy, but clarified himself that he's using the philosophical and not "common speech" definition.
So I say he has fulfilled his part to get people to understand
The apartment wanted to use FB as a mass-messaging system. You know for building announcements, pool cleaning day, parking lot reminders, picnic day etc.
BUT they did it an uncool way: by forcing & threatening. Also by assuming everyone was on FB.
Could they not print flyers on fluorescent paper & tack them to corkboards like every other apartment in the world?
Amateur move by a hipster with a business card proclaiming them 'boss' but who is out of their league when it comes to actual business management.
_
https://www.ksl.com/?sid=39954863&nid=148&title=unlike-tenants-fume-over-apartment-complexs-new-facebook-addendum