Comment by gruez
1 day ago
>Take it or leave it license agreements in my opinion violate meeting-of-the-minds, and our legal system has just cut a pass for the last half a century to one sided take it or leave it levels of exploitative entering into contracts at scale.
I might be sympathetic to this if this was some essential service with strong network effects such that there's no alternative (eg. facebook or whatsapp), but that's not the case here. This is a separate "security" app, of which there's probably dozens of competitors that you can choose from if you don't like the ToS/privacy policy of this one, so the "one sided take it or leave it levels of exploitative entering into contracts at scale" aspect you're decrying really rings hollow.
>This is a separate "security" app, of which there's probably dozens of competitors that you can choose from if you don't like the ToS/privacy policy of this one, so the "one sided take it or leave it levels of exploitative entering into contracts at scale" aspect you're decrying really rings hollow.
You mean like a loud ass bell rings? Point out to me a single piece of software utilizing a EULA that supports individual redlining and renegotiation on a user by user basis, with a feedback loop tight enough to be reasonable. I'll wait. The point is there might be the illusion of user choice there, but when the overarching legal framework operates in unity in a take it or leave it fashion, with no escape hatch, every business model behaves the same. No one builds the business willing to charge for contractual dumb pipe, because everyone is just dumping anyone else who won't take the default terms. The entire architecture of our networked world has turned into building machines through which everyone gives up every right and civil protection through a goddamn click, nevermind the fact Third Party Doctrine in this age has completely dismantled the 4th Amendment by extension.
>Point out to me a single piece of software utilizing a EULA that supports individual redlining and renegotiation on a user by user basis, with a feedback loop tight enough to be reasonable. I'll wait.
If you want apps priced at $0.99 or even $99.99, standard form, take it or leave it contracts is the only game in town, for pure economic reasons. No company is going to bother getting legal involved to negotiate a bespoke contract for anything with less than 5 figures TCV.
And that's the problem. Contracts weren't meant to cover everything. We've taken a legal instrument, and based the entire bloody economy around it without bloody stopping to realize that, oh geez maybe having people click through a billion contracts they don't bloody read might cause deleterious effects in the civic macrocosm. The fact you're sitting here telling me it's a non starter just cements my point. The tech industry is predicated on predatory legalism, and click wrapped contracting. In point of fact, if you took the digital product away and tried to click wrapped literally anything else, the consumer would laugh at you. Only with digital products, whose terms can be changed at the will of the hosting company's legal department unilaterally, with no notice, and no recourse, other than termination of service is the root of the bloody problem. And we have an entire generation of business people who have been educated to think this behavior that results in massive exposure of clients personal data to outside firms and legal processes are 100% A-OK. If you think it'd be impossible to do business any other way, you are unironically one of the benefactors of the problen created and enabled by tech.