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UK Wifi Provider Tricks Customers Into Agreeing To Clean Sewers (upi.com)
An anonymous reader quotes UPI:
Unwitting customers in the United Kingdom who didn't read the terms and conditions for use of a public WiFi hotspot agreed to perform 1,000 hours of community service, including unclogging sewers and scraping gum off the street. The gag was conceived by WiFi provider Purple. The company inserted the clause into its terms and conditions -- the technically legally binding agreement consumers approve in exchange for use of free Internet, though virtually few actually read the terms. The company said it did so to call attention to the fact consumers are regularly agreeing to terms that they may not actually like, including granting access to private information and data about their web browsing habits.
Other community service tasks agreed to by users included "providing hugs to stray cats and dogs" and "painting snail shells to brighten up their existence." The agreement also promised a prize to anyone who actually became aware of the prize's existences after reading the terms and conditions -- yet after two weeks only one person came forward to claim the prize.
Other community service tasks agreed to by users included "providing hugs to stray cats and dogs" and "painting snail shells to brighten up their existence." The agreement also promised a prize to anyone who actually became aware of the prize's existences after reading the terms and conditions -- yet after two weeks only one person came forward to claim the prize.
and conditions....there's the "null"
Any truly competent lawyer should be able to demonstrate that they are badly designed from a human factors and effective communication perspective, as evidenced by the fact that they are almost always unread yet clicked on by almost everybody. It's not an effective contract, since there was no effective communication about it.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
I donate any prizes I win to widows and orphans.
The Fine Print Society
http://privatopia.blogspot.com/2011/12/fine-print-society.html
by Evan McKenzie
Thursday, December 22, 2011
As I go over all the bills and statements and announcements and changes to this or that plan or arrangement or contract that have flooded into my mailbox recently, it occurs to me that this is a form of concerted action. Corporate managers have collectively determined to overwhelm us with fine print. We can't possibly read all this crap, much less meditate like some 18th century aristocrat on the implications of the content. Yet we can't do so much as download an update to Adobe Acrobat without "signing" a contract. We are conclusively presumed to have read, understood, and agreed to every lawyer-drafted word, and yet everybody knows that none of us reads this. Not even Ron Paul -- so don't start with me. And the more of these contracts we get, the less likely it is that we will read any of them. So corporations have an incentive to send more of them and make them longer and more verbose. This is a collective decision on their part, and it is working, and they know it.
Nearly all of this stuff is enforceable, as many an HOA or condo unit owner has discovered, and it makes citizens relatively powerless. The private logic of contract law structures the relationship as individual consumer vs. big corporation with government as the enforcer of the contract, instead of citizens vs. powerful private organizations, with government as policy maker holding jurisdiction over the relationship.
The law calls these boilerplate documents "contracts of adhesion," but the days are long past when judges were willing to throw them out because they were drafted by one party and imposed on the other, there was gross inequality of bargaining power, and there was no real assent to the terms. Now they are deemed essential to the free flow of modern commerce.
My view has always been that policy makers should be willing to step in and reform these relationships if they become predatory or destructive. But there is little stomach for that presently.
7 comments:
which specifies Right Whale A-221 as the arbitrator....because, of course, the rulings are always right....
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
So, shouldn't they be calling attention to the ridiculous EULA ecosystem that companies have managed to create, where the agreements are so long and full of legal jargon that the average person can't possibly be expected to fully understand them? Shouldn't they be doing that instead of mocking those same people who either didn't read or didn't understand what they were agreeing to?
"Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
If there is any city in the world that best understands clean sewers it would be London.
UK wifi provider: LOL! jokes all around! we didnt really want you to paint snail shells!
US wifi provider: You will paint shells until your fucking hands drop off, and if so much as one of them chips, we will grind everyone you love into paint for the next batch.
Adjit Pai: sounds like fun! pick any of your favourite colours youre told to pick!
Good people go to bed earlier.
Can anyone cite an example of a "click-through" contract being enforced in a court of law?
They should have used that exact language in the EULA.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Who let the pots roll down the stairs?
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
I'm surprised that their legal team did this, because it could arguably be used to invalidate the entire contract.
The validity of contracts is predicated on the understanding that people actually read and understand the terms of a contract before agreeing to them. By clearly demonstrating that the other party has not read the terms, it's hard to argue that the contract is binding. It's like signing a contract in a language that you demonstrably don't understand.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
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Not sure about the current status, but for quite awhile, a click through EULA was binding in Virginia and Texas - both places with a ton of federal government and contractor software pirate scofflaws....
Not an attempt to be funny...
Why guess when you can know? Measure!
Will this one be deemed "silly" while the one from big money that wants rights to any works written with their word processor - or use of any stored pictures? OK, "community service is silly", go ahead judge.
To make people READ, set it up so blindly clicking 'next' just fails.
Plenty of sites already do that. They require people to load the text, scroll to the end, and then click. People still don't read it. I know I don't. Why should I? Click-through contracts are not enforceable other than the implied contract that would be just as enforceable without the clicking.
Do you really think the ISP in the summary would be able to use the courts to force people to clean sewers? Of course not. There are no legal repercussions for just blindly clicking, nor should there be.
do we _want_ click EULAs to be legally binding. In particular the ones that obfuscate the terms of the EULA? You know, they don't have to be, right? We as a civilization can decide they are not.
Of course, that would require not holding people responsible for their actions 100% of the time. And that's something folks don't like. People seem to want each other to suffer unnecessarily. As near as I can tell it's because life is hard for most of us and if our lives are going to suck then everybody else's damn well better too.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
X-Terms-Of-Service:By responding to this request, you agree to place no restrictions on the data you send (or that is sent on your behalf). You further agree that no subsequent terms of service or other notice may modify this provision. Stated another way you agree that any and all end user license agreements or similar restrictions you have provided or may provide in the future are null and void.
I have never had a web site refuse to serve me content based on my terms of service. Every web server I have used has automatically "clicked through" and agreed to my terms. I figure that if a web server can act as a legal proxy for a company, there is no reason why that proxy wouldn't work in both directions. A contact must be "signed" by both parties and companies are delegating authority to sign their end of the deal to their web servers. If a a web server can act as a legal representative and enter the company into a binding contract, then surely the same web server can accept my contract and legally bind the company to it
They might argue that it is not practical to provide a legal team to review all of the headers in all of the requests that come in. I agree -- It is also not practical for web site users to hire legal times to review the EULA for every website they visit.
Is my approach legally sound? Probably not. Am I a lawyer? No. Is it an interesting legal question? I think it is. Does it provide me entertainment thinking about it? Definitely.
EULAs are toilet paper in EU. Microsoft and Oracle learned the hard way when ECJ approved resale of OEM software.
Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
Most EULA's ask you to do business with a sewer.
Table-ized A.I.
Alas, under the law you are responsible for actions of your minor children.
Not only did I have all my vaccinations as a kid, but I recently had shots for shingles (having had natural chicken pox back in the nineteen hundreds, when children still had to go through that) and pneumonia. No matter how much GMO-free tofu you may have gorged on, just my getting close to you would probably give you autism.
Yup. There is no guarantee that I didn't modify the agreement before agreeing. I could have changed it to say "slashdot UID 666 Anonymous Coward is entitled to free pizza at any time or day to be paid for by *insert website/software/service owner name here*"
And that's a lot of pizza.
Frankly, I find it just impossible to read every document I have to sign for every-day life. Not because of time but because my brain just wants to melt, flow out my ears and run away.
I think companies should be required to make customers aware of any kinds of things that are part of a contract which are not immediately obvious to a layman.
So the fact that coffee is hot when freshly bought would not apply but if the only reason your internet is so cheap is the fact that you sell my data, then you better put that on the front page or get sued.
However the TOS included a Herold clause that allowed the company to claim the first born child or the beloved pet of the users who agreed.
One of the terms stipulated that the user must give up their firstborn child or most beloved pet in exchange for WiFi use. In the short time the T&C page was active, six people agreed to the outlandish clause.
Link
It won't enforce contracts that are unreasonable or hard to understand. This protects consumers a great deal.
I don't think the article knows the meaning of "technically legally binding". Such a clause is not technically legally binding as case law has demonstrated consumers are not bound to legal clauses that they don't expect in the normal course of a business.
Can't remember the case myself but it had someone to do with someone trying to get someone else signing over the deed of the house on a delivery slip.
WiFi hotspot EULAs I care least about. For the simple reason that it's very hard to trace back anything I do on that hotspot to me. When connecting to a free WiFi hotspot I usually do this because I have some time on my hands and want to get some work done, not because I want to read legalese. Considering the length of these "agreements" you can probably only get halfway before it's time to move on... leaving you no chance to actually make use of the network.
The exception is that any contract entered by the child is null and void.
No quite nobody. EULAs are why I first switched from MS to Apple, and then later to Linux. And this was before Linux had a decent word processor, so it took motivation.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
I happily click "click this to proceed" buttons, commonly labeled "Accept" for exactly this reason. There is no legal repercussion for checking a box and clicking a button on the internet. Can they prove it was me that clicked it, or did someone else? If someone else used my computer and clicked "I agree", that doesn't make me liable for anything. Can you prove that you didn't change the text since I've clicked? When I modified the text and agreed to it, you obviously accepted those modifications, because you let me in. Did you not keep a copy?
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
Include the links next time.
In the UK at least, if you didn't pay, there's no contract.