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US Court of Appeals: TOS may be updated by email, use can imply consent [pdf]

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Re: US Court of Appeals: TOS may be updated by email, use can imply consent [pdf]

#221

Post by throwaway173738 »

danlitt wrote: post #108
stinkbeetle wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The entire notion of being allowed to enforce arbitrary terms of service is absurd. There are probably a handful of terms everyone agrees are reasonable (no attempted hacking, rate limits, do not break laws) and everything else should be unenforceable. Why? Why should a government prohibit private parties from agreeing to anything other than those 3 things? > Especially garbage like what you're allowed to do with t…

> Why should a government prohibit private parties from agreeing to anything other than those 3 things? > I'm not saying any term should be enforceable. Contract law has a long history against that. I just wonder how and where you draw the line and what existing law is insufficient. This is not a magic list of 3 things that I think is complete. I think there is a compromise between allowing companies to add arbitrary…

Judges which apply that sort of reasoning really ought to think about how it applies to a hospital visit in which they were incapacitated and received a bunch of treatment. Would it be legally appropriate to slip a term about binding arbitration, or a hold harmless, or maybe a release allowing photos of their visit to be used for advertising?

Re: US Court of Appeals: TOS may be updated by email, use can imply consent [pdf]

#222

Post by Forgeties79 »

dpoloncsak wrote: post #213
Forgeties79 wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I canceled all of our subscriptions about two years ago and set up a Plex server. I don’t love the direction Plex is going in so I’m teeing up to flip to Jellyfin, but still, it has been so much better than dealing with all of these companies and nonsense. I feel like we can’t even call it “advertising“ anymore. It’s such a misnomer. It’s basically data fracking and psychological warfare to make us all into little ad…

Similar boat...I'd also like to swap off Plex but a few of my less techie friends use it and I'm worried about the compatibility/ease of setup of Jellyfin on their devices. Thought about running both in parallel but that seems like a waste. Think I just need a migration day eventually

Yeah nothing is as turnkey as plex, hard to give that up if you’re running a little streaming service for friends and family haha

Re: US Court of Appeals: TOS may be updated by email, use can imply consent [pdf]

#223

Post by dfxm12 »

shirro wrote: post #166

There are so many advantages to turning off and disconnecting these days. Avoiding TOS is just a small part. There are too many demands on our attention and our wallets and most of us aren't getting more money or time. I cancelled all the family's streaming services in 2025. Everyone adapted. It turns out a lot of things we are told we need, we really don't. People lived without them as recently as a few years ago. A…

Counterpoint: fighting for consumer protections is a fight worth not avoiding. Interacting with some of these systems is simply unavoidable (think payment systems, health care portals, email, etc.) & larger corporations already enjoy a huge power imbalance in this relationship. We will just get run over further if we hide from it.

Re: US Court of Appeals: TOS may be updated by email, use can imply consent [pdf]

#224

Post by seabass-labrax »

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #207
everdrive wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every single ToS is written to benefit the company, and when necessary, harm the consumer. The answer is to enter into as few service contracts as possible. Use open source software. Control when your software updates. Really, never use the cloud version of anything whatsoever except where unavoidable. (eg: email and such) They feel like the legal equivalent of Calvin Ball. So long as you just stash it in a ToS, you…

>The answer is to enter into as few service contracts as possible. Any contract where the other party performs so little seeking of my agreement (none at all really) that no representative talks to me in person or even electronically in an individual capacity, where no one witnesses me put my mark on the paper or hears by verbal assent, is in fact no contract at all. Despite what the courts may say. Should they say o…

Isn't that a bit extreme? As a counterpoint, I find it useful to be able to pay for a train journey by tapping my card on an electronic reader - no representative of the company is there or otherwise witnesses me doing so - but I have entered into a contract whereby I am entitled to travel to a distant location. And I do want it to be a contract, because the transport company agrees to get me to my destination somehow even if the trains are cancelled. Perhaps the conditions of carriage may be somehow unsatisfactory to me, but the way in which I enter into the contract is almost entirely unrelated.

Re: US Court of Appeals: TOS may be updated by email, use can imply consent [pdf]

#225

Post by rolandog »

SkyBelow wrote: post #149
jdiff wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It gets worse with added context: signed up for a free trial of Disney+ on a PS5 many years ago.

It gets worse x2: the executor of the estate having signed up for Disney+ means the estate of the deceased loses the right to sue, despite the deceased having never signed up. Like a client being bound by all unrelated legal agreements their lawyer entered into. (If I recall the details correct, it has been a while since I read into that case.)

Common sense and decency has departed the world's economic and legal systems for a while, huh?

It now seems to be a "how evil can I be without it affecting our bottom line?" system.

Re: US Court of Appeals: TOS may be updated by email, use can imply consent [pdf]

#226

Post by malfist »

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #207
everdrive wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every single ToS is written to benefit the company, and when necessary, harm the consumer. The answer is to enter into as few service contracts as possible. Use open source software. Control when your software updates. Really, never use the cloud version of anything whatsoever except where unavoidable. (eg: email and such) They feel like the legal equivalent of Calvin Ball. So long as you just stash it in a ToS, you…

>The answer is to enter into as few service contracts as possible. Any contract where the other party performs so little seeking of my agreement (none at all really) that no representative talks to me in person or even electronically in an individual capacity, where no one witnesses me put my mark on the paper or hears by verbal assent, is in fact no contract at all. Despite what the courts may say. Should they say o…

> Despite what the courts may say

When the rubber meets the road, what the courts say is all that matters.

Re: US Court of Appeals: TOS may be updated by email, use can imply consent [pdf]

#227

Post by gruez »

blharr wrote: post #214
shirro wrote: post #166

There are so many advantages to turning off and disconnecting these days. Avoiding TOS is just a small part. There are too many demands on our attention and our wallets and most of us aren't getting more money or time. I cancelled all the family's streaming services in 2025. Everyone adapted. It turns out a lot of things we are told we need, we really don't. People lived without them as recently as a few years ago. A…

Sure, but even the specific case isn't about TOS within the limits of screen time or online browsing. It's about tracking your physical location via Tile trackers. Sure, you can get off streaming services, but you're still signing a TOS or waiver by using any service. Meta/Google/etc has a profile on you even if you've never logged in based on others sharing their contacts and pictures that may include you.

>It's about tracking your physical location via Tile trackers.

1. If the complaint is about non-consensual tracking, using a gadget that's specifically designed and advertised for tracking, and that you have to specifically go out and buy and put on your body is a terrible example.

2. Tile trackers have more or less been replaced with airtags and whatever google's equivalent is, which is designed in such a way that prevents companies from knowing its actual location.

Re: US Court of Appeals: TOS may be updated by email, use can imply consent [pdf]

#228

Post by Imustaskforhelp »

Forgeties79 wrote: post #202
Imustaskforhelp wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jellyfin is nice but I could never understand how to setup when all I wanted was to watch videos from server for example. So I used copyparty[0] and used VLC and set a username and password. I recommend copyparty if you just want something quick and easy actually. Just try it out on cheap VPS and just run it and forget it. https://github.com/9001/copyparty

The big thing is being able to stream outside of my home network. Running stuff locally is easy enough with basically any system luckily

Yes but you can actually have Copyparty run as a server similar to Jellyfin and have the same thing too?

Am I missing something that I am not looking at? But won't jellyfin have the same issue, I think that plex has servers that you can connect from outside but the GP wanted to move to jellyfin and I was talking about that.

And, you can even have plex like thing by just having Cloudflare Tunnels/Tailscale + Copyparty too.

Re: US Court of Appeals: TOS may be updated by email, use can imply consent [pdf]

#229

Post by datsci_est_2015 »

mghackerlady wrote: post #205
datsci_est_2015 wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This ruling taken in conjunction with “in the future you will own nothing, and you will be happy” paints quite the dystopian picture where not even “turning off and disconnecting” will save you.

the way we're headed (and largely already are) "turning off and disconnecting" will be a privilege of the rich and dream of the stubborn

Indeed. “Privilege of the rich” could be the subtitle for the biography of America. Perhaps founded on the basis of rights for all men, but always denying or chipping away at those rights for the classes of labor.

I’m always cheering for the farmers who are taking on John Deere for the right to repair.

Re: US Court of Appeals: TOS may be updated by email, use can imply consent [pdf]

#230

Post by KellyCriterion »

shirro wrote: post #166

There are so many advantages to turning off and disconnecting these days. Avoiding TOS is just a small part. There are too many demands on our attention and our wallets and most of us aren't getting more money or time. I cancelled all the family's streaming services in 2025. Everyone adapted. It turns out a lot of things we are told we need, we really don't. People lived without them as recently as a few years ago. A…

The only reason why I bought a smartphone (first time!) in 2013 was because everyone aronud me had one and they were asking for WhatsApp - util then I was fine with my 4-color-crap phone :-D (and I didnt even know what WhatsApp was)
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