Why you should never poo-poo those pesky Ts&cs
WHAT’S half an hour of free wi-fi worth to you? How about 1 000 hours of cleaning toilets, unblocking sewers and other unpleasant tasks?
That’s the stinky bargain 22 000 people recently made when they failed to read the terms and conditions of a UK wif-fi company. Manchesterbased Purple says they inserted the “community service” clause for a period of two weeks, “to illustrate the lack of consumer awareness of what they are signing up to when they access free wi-fi”.
It also offered a prize for anyone who had actually read the terms and conditions, and called them out on the clause. Depressingly, but unsurprisingly, just one person claimed it. Fortunately for the unwitting signatories, Purple says it has no intention of enforcing the agreement.
It isn’t the first company to catch out consumers with sneaky additions to the small print. In 2010, retailer Gamestation snapped up 7 500 customer souls for all eternity thanks to a clause in its terms and perdition, er conditions.
And in 2014, cybersecurity firm F-secure ran an experiment like Purple’s, operating a wi-fi hotspot in London that anyone could use – in exchange for their first-born child. Despite the “Herod clause” being clearly stated in the terms and conditions, six suckers happily signed up.
Fortunately, as F-secure itself conceded, “while terms and conditions are legally binding – it is contrary to public policy to sell children in return for free services, so the clause would not be enforceable in a court of law”.
Alas, most terms and conditions are legally enforceable, yet most of us blithely agree to them without a second thought, a mindset the companies who undertake these publicity stunts claim they are attempting change.
It doesn’t help that most of these documents are long and couched in dense legalese that makes them impenetrable to the layperson.
One of the biggest offenders in this regard is itunes’ marathon Terms and Conditions document. While the verbiage conceals nothing quite as alarming as poo cleaning or soul sacrificing, it does contain several pretty consumerunfriendly clauses, most notably one in which you acknowledge that you don’t actually own any of the media you “buy”, you’re merely paying for the privilege of watching or listening to it.
The itunes terms also forbid you to use apps to break the law. And lest there be any misunderstanding, they go into some pretty specific detail. If, for example, you were planning to use an app to help you in the “development, design, manufacture, or production of nuclear, missile, or chemical or biological weapons”, you should probably reconsider as you risk having your account cancelled.
Amazon’s Ts&cs are similarly draconian, as a Norwegian woman discovered in 2015 when the company wiped her account and deleted all the e-books she’d bought without warning or explanation. According to an article in the Guardian (Link: bit.ly/gkbrdwipe), the hapless customer, identified only as Linn, was unable to get an satisfactory explanation from Amazon for the action, despite several email exchanges.
“This shows the very worst of DRM (digital rights management),” it quoted blogger Martin Bekkelund, who first raised the case, as commenting. “If the retailer, in this case Amazon, thinks you’re a crook, they will throw you out and take away everything that you bought.
“And if you disagree, you’re totally outlawed. With DRM, you don’t buy and own books, you merely rent them for as long as the retailer finds it convenient.”
Ethics lecturer David Tuffley, writing in The Conversation (Link: bit.ly/gkbrdloos), cites the more recent example, raised by the consumer group Choice, of Amazon’s Kindle Voyage e-reader, which has a minimum of eight documents that need to be read and agreed to when buying the device, as well as documents to be read to use any subscription service.
Choice estimated that it would take about nine hours to read the more than 73 000 words in those documents.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Tuffley gives the example of Creative Commons, which includes a “human readable” summary of its licensing conditions. It breaks it down to the basics then highlights anything out of the ordinary.
“It’s not difficult to do this, and if you have nothing to hide, the user is unlikely to be scared off by it,” he says. I couldn’t agree more. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve still got 200 more toilets to clean today. ●Follow Alan Cooper on Twitter @alanqcooper.