Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Why did Microsoft, Meta, and PayPal update their ToS today?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 191 posts

Re: Ask HN: Why did Microsoft, Meta, and PayPal update their ToS today?

#61

Post by jacooper »

toyg wrote: post #45
niemandhier wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems to be a decision by the commission, not the the high court. These two bodies tend to counter each other a lot, I would expect to have a court ruling in 2 years that cancels this decision.

On this particular subject, it's basically realpolitik. Court: "US law is incompatible with ours" Executive: "Yeah but I'm sure we can all get along ..."

And then shrems III happens because it's clearly illegal.

https://noyb.eu/en/23-years-illegal-data-transfers-due-inact...

Re: Ask HN: Why did Microsoft, Meta, and PayPal update their ToS today?

#62

Post by ssl232 »

deely3 wrote: post #59
throwaway290 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. And it's actually quite easy for some of these products (except maybe for PayPal if you don't have a bank account).

Yeah, just change place of work everytime when company asks you to do somwthing with any Microsoft product. Is this your solution?

Are the terms for Microsoft business customers different to those for end users, with regards to privacy and tracking? Can my ssl232@mycompany.com email provided by Office365 get tracked around the internet just the same as ssl232@gmail.com?

Re: Ask HN: Why did Microsoft, Meta, and PayPal update their ToS today?

#63

Post by throwaway290 »

deely3 wrote: post #59
throwaway290 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. And it's actually quite easy for some of these products (except maybe for PayPal if you don't have a bank account).

Yeah, just change place of work everytime when company asks you to do somwthing with any Microsoft product. Is this your solution?

If this is your work account then switching is down to your employer and they probably have a legal dept to understand all ToS anyway. But any ToS change shouldn't affect you much because you shouldn't be using it for personal stuff.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Microsoft, Meta, and PayPal update their ToS today?

#64

Post by jddj »

throwaway290 wrote: post #63
deely3 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, just change place of work everytime when company asks you to do somwthing with any Microsoft product. Is this your solution?

If this is your work account then switching is down to your employer and they probably have a legal dept to understand all ToS anyway. But any ToS change shouldn't affect you much because you shouldn't be using it for personal stuff.

I don't think the venn diagram of companies using outlook/office365 and companies with a well resourced legal department has as much overlap as one might hope

Re: Ask HN: Why did Microsoft, Meta, and PayPal update their ToS today?

#68

Post by janalsncm »

Zetice wrote: post #50
kramerger wrote: post #43

I tried to read some of them to see what has changed. I really tried... If any lawyers from the future are reading this: It was impossible for me to see what I was agreeing to. Furthermore, I was not given a chance to not agree with these (unknown) changes.

The answer to this is to not agree to it (your “chance” is to stop using the service).

This “solution” is a non-starter. People like to imagine that we have a marketplace with degrees of freedom in all directions, but we don’t. We have to make choices, and often that just means choosing the least bad option.

But it is interesting to note how we got here.

https://www.npr.org/2023/07/13/1187543648/terms-and-conditio...

To summarize the podcast episode, contracts used to be individually tailored, but businesses found that too onerous and just wrote boilerplate contracts for all customers to sign. Then they decided the signing part became too onerous for businesses so courts decided that using the product was enough to agree to terms. So now we’re at a point where not using the product is legitimately the only way not to agree to whatever terms the company decides.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Microsoft, Meta, and PayPal update their ToS today?

#69

Post by tgv »

throwaway290 wrote: post #63
deely3 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, just change place of work everytime when company asks you to do somwthing with any Microsoft product. Is this your solution?

If this is your work account then switching is down to your employer and they probably have a legal dept to understand all ToS anyway. But any ToS change shouldn't affect you much because you shouldn't be using it for personal stuff.

As the other comment hints: most companies don't have lawyers. And then they'd probably be specialized in another area. Only very large companies can afford to have legal staff looking at some random ToS change.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Microsoft, Meta, and PayPal update their ToS today?

#70

Post by mihaaly »

kramerger wrote: post #43

I tried to read some of them to see what has changed. I really tried... If any lawyers from the future are reading this: It was impossible for me to see what I was agreeing to. Furthermore, I was not given a chance to not agree with these (unknown) changes.

It is spectacular how incompetent lawyers are providing service to the public that pays them eventually, they are only able to communicate to other lawyers, so why should we use their services at all? We can get into trouble without them the same easy being cluless either way.
Post reply on HN