9 ms·
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
by kramerger 3y ago
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.
- Zetice 3y agoThe answer to this is to not agree to it (your “chance” is to stop using the service).
- throwaway290 3y agoExactly. And it's actually quite easy for some of these products (except maybe for PayPal if you don't have a bank account).
- deely3 3y agoYeah, just change place of work everytime when company asks you to do somwthing with any Microsoft product. Is this your solution?
- ssl232 3y agoAre 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?
- throwaway290 3y agoIt probably is tracked but you don't care unless you are using company provided accounts/infra to do personal stuff and then that's your actual problem
- throwaway290 3y agoIf 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.
- jddj 3y agoI 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
- HeavyStorm 3y agoIt doesn't. I know companies with as little as 3 people who are Microsoft business users, of course.
- ahtihn 3y agoI'd expect the set of companies with a well resourced legal department to be almost fully contained in the set of companies using outlook/office365. What else is there for corporate email?
- Filligree 3y agoMine uses gmail. It works well enough.
- ahtihn 3y agoAny company that has concerns about Office 365's ToS isn't even going to consider looking at Google services.
- throwaway290 3y agoWhy? I assume you read O365 and GW terms and compare so what's the diff?
- 3y ago
- datavirtue 3y agoFast approaching. I used to be a fairly happy Microsoft....uh...person-slash-developer. It isn't worth the stress of trying to make their shit work these days. Their last chance with me was the Power Platform. Absolutely horrid POS. Then a story breaks that reveals epic security flaws in the same platform (and across Azure nonetheless). High amount of wtf moments. Stay away for mental health purposes...I'm serious.
- Zetice 3y agoYes? You can work decades in many careers without touching a Microsoft product. Ut more importantly, you have no right to Microsoft products, and it regularly blows my mind when people try to argue otherwise. Besides, if your beliefs are so incompatible with society that they exclude you from holding down a job, that belief becomes a pathology, not a conviction. Understanding how to operate successfully in society is a critical part of being an adult.
- toast0 3y agoAt least in my corporate experience, it's hard for IT to avoid the pull of Exchange + Outlook. And it's hard to work at a company when you refuse to use email.
- Zetice 3y agoHard is not impossible, and if you want to put strange moral constraints on who you work for, that's your cross to bear.
- salawat 3y agoInteresting. So riddle me this. Microsoft goes to great lengths to court primary education systems to instill themselves as the "taught software stack". You say no one has any right to Microsoft's products... Then does that not run into somewhat of a public contradiction when public education systems shove it down students throats? In point of fact, it sounds like the publically taught option should be exclusively GPL or other FLOSS software offerings, because contrary to your assertion, every student does have an implicit right to those as a public good.
- Zetice 3y agoNo, in no way at all is what you just described anything resembling a "contradiction". If you've used Google Docs or Libre Office for more than 5 seconds you'd know that. If you want to nationalize Microsoft, petition your congressperson to do so.
- janalsncm 3y agoThis “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-conditions-of-service-contracts-clickwrap 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.
- uptie 3y agoNon starter is a term often overused
- cal85 3y agoIf your point is that its use is invalid here, then say why.
- spacecadet 3y agoBecause this is not a non-starter as suggested. I leave services because of their terms... I have rebuilt services because of their terms... You start what need to.
- Buttons840 3y agoI want a political cartoon: Panel #1 shows "The Free Market Ideal" with people bustling about, negotiating with the owners of wooden carts filled with produce and goods, lots of people and energy. Panel #2 show "The Free Market Reality" with a bunch of tired people waiting in line for one of two computer terminals, one of which is showing an error screen and it appears may have broken (the other is showing a ToS).
- xen0 3y agoHobson's Choice is not something to be celebrated.
- more_corn 3y agoI disagree that this qualifies as a choice. (Though it does appear to be the prevailing opinion)
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- mihaaly 3y agoIt 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.
- bandergirl 3y agoLawyers are not paid to provide a service to the public, you got that mixed up. They’re writing code to protect the company that hired them. The language used by the law is not the common language because the latter is prone to bugs.
- HeavyStorm 3y agoTheir embellished way of writing also is. But being cryptic to the general population has its benefits - to them, of course.
- davorak 3y agoI think the spirt of the statement still works if you move the incompetence up when level so something along the lines of ~"It is spectacular how incompetent that the law allows confused/convoluted communication to act as protection to the company hired the lawyers to produce said communication." It seems like society would be better off if the law were set up to where only when clear communication has happened that the lawyer would bring benefit to their employer.
- paulmd 3y agoIt wouldn’t be much better if the language were plain and simple. “We can do what we want with your data and you can’t sue us under any circumstances resulting from your use of the service, and you disclaim all rights to the maximum extent permissible by your local consumer laws” wouldn’t be any better for you. The problem is contracts of adhesion are inherently unconscionable, as are contracts that require signing away rights without consideration (above and beyond the use of the service). If you’re doing something with the data beyond providing the service (in a GDPR sense) then there needs to be an actual consideration to the customer for the resulting profit above and beyond the use of the service.
- xyzzy123 3y agoMore or less you should assume that any consumer contract promises you exactly the minimum allowable within the framework of applicable laws. That is the intent. Practically what this means is that it is useless to negotiate with big companies or really even read their terms (unless you have skills to spot errors) - the best one can do is support campaigns for expanded privacy laws, consumer rights etc.
- hutzlibu 3y agoThat seems to summarize it and is my take as well except that you can negotiate with them to an extent as you can avoid that product and this can have an effect if you can also convince other people of doing so. Sure, usually people don’t care (or think they have no choice), but sometimes they do care enough to at least push alternatives as seen in the cases of twitter and reddit.
- LightBug1 3y agoWe're in really horrible territory and it's getting worse. c.f. the whole "video calls to train their AI at Zoom" (later: "unless you opt out", sorta) pullava ...
- bilsbie 3y agoI like that strategy but what’s stopping them from saying they get your car or something really outrageous?
- kwanbix 3y agoIt is crazy how unreasonable the world of law is. Just some days ago, I installed some game (Assassins Creed I think?) and it had 3 agreements to read, each one a kilometer long (just a figure of speech). Really? To play a game? Of course nobody reads them and just press Accept.
- Hackbraten 3y agoWhat I do is spot check, i.e. open an agreement, pick two or three spots at random, and do my best to read and understand those. My hope is if just 1000 people did that, they’d be able to collectively spot unexpected/unacceptable terms and make them public.
- nabogh 3y agoGood idea. I might start doing this
- FranGro78 3y agoSounds like building something simple that aids in tracking “coverage” of reviewing ToSs could be useful to increase that the odds of spotting something untoward? Iirc there was (is?) a site which gives a rating to the various license agreements of popular services and the like, so maybe it’s a solved problem?
- Hasnep 3y agoI have the TOS;DR extension [1] and it gives a rating to each website's TOS and offers an explanation of the key points. [1] https://tosdr.org/ https://tosdr.org/
- __s 3y agoI remember seeing iTunes terms tell me I could not use the software to run a nuclear reactor
- 3y ago
- Alifatisk 3y agoHave you heard of tosdr.org?
- xtracto 3y agoThis is one thing I strongly wish that the EU political arm could throw all its weight as it did with GDPR: Create an insanely strong law like GDPR making businesses have simple non-lawyeresque Terms of Services.
- shadyfroyo 3y agoComplexity is fraud.
- MikusR 3y agohttps://www.microsoft.com/en-us/servicesagreement/upcoming-updates https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/servicesagreement/upcoming-u... https://www.paypal.com/us/legalhub/upcoming-policies-full https://www.paypal.com/us/legalhub/upcoming-policies-full