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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]

#51

Post by thaumasiotes »

dataflow wrote: post #4

Fundamentally, the court seems to be treating this identically to a scenario where the user was ignorant and failed to read their inbox. The court seems to be completely disregarding that it was misdelivered into spam. The word "spam" doesn't even appear more than twice in the ruling (one of which is in an irrelevant footnote)! Why the heck is the court completely oblivious to that fact when weighing the facts on eac…

> The court seems to be completely disregarding that it was misdelivered into spam.

Spam categorization isn't a delivery issue. The delivery is the same whether you, upon taking delivery, toss the message into a bin labeled "spam" or one labeled "inbox".

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

#53

Post by hsbauauvhabzb »

EarthAmbassador wrote: post #22
hsbauauvhabzb wrote: post #16

The email account I cannot access because google decided to ask me for a captcha for which I have no knowledge of, and the don’t have a human help desk that I can contact to prove ownership by providing ID documents? Got it.

Exactly. I don't understand how a community such as this, as connected as it is, can't back channel a message to Google brass to do something about these lockouts, which occur frequently and are unnecessary. There is no way Google doesn't know about them. Gmail is an essential piece of pervasive personal infrastructure, upon which hundreds of millions of people rely. People are losing irreplaceable data for lack of c…

The cost of adding a support desk outweighs any potential profit, I would imagine by a huge amount given accounts are ‘free’.

It’s not that the executive don’t know, it’s that they don’t care.

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

#55

Post by internet_points »

jmward01 wrote: post #28

Hm. It seems that use actually goes two ways. They continue to use my information even when I leave their platform. Does this mean I can email info@google.com updated TOS, since I am a party to it I guess, and if they keep selling my info they accept it?

No, because of the legal principle of habeas pecuniam (you can't afford as many lawyers as Google)

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

#59

Post by danlitt »

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. Especially garbage like what you're allowed to do with the stuff you get from the service even while not using the service, or about setting up competing products. It's like McDonald's selling you a burger and telling you how to eat it.

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

#60

Post by lurk2 »

The original Minecraft EULA did not have any of the usual boilerplate language to support unilaterally modifying the terms. I had a Minecraft account purchased under this original EULA which was modified a year or two after I bought the game. Around 5 or 6 years ago, Mojang emailed me about changes to their login system that would require me to migrate my account to Microsoft’s system (no doubt under new T+C), but the migration process never worked and they never responded to my support requests.

When I tried to resolve it a couple of years ago I received boilerplate emails informing me that the migration period had ended.

So if you deal with companies that simply don’t honor their contracts—companies like Microsoft and Mojang—you don’t even need use to imply consent, because they can just lock you out of your purchases and tell you to pound sand.

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