If you enroll in Equifax's TrustedID you waive your rights to sue Equifax

You mean sort of like having to pay a fee to lock your credit report with the same company that just leaked all your info? Yea...

Whether the term highlighted in the post is valid or not is another thing. Not sure about the US but in England I would hope that would be considered an unfair contract term in a consumer contract.

For those who are unaware, contract law deals with a process of people exchanging things, usually in the form of promises -- "I will mow your lawn in exchange for $30" is a contract, even if it is never written down. There are a lot of interesting ways that this law works: for example you will see reasonably often something like "I'll give you $30 to mow my lawn" / "Deal!" / "What about $20?", where the one side seems to be assuming that there is no actual contract until they both say "Deal!" -- but actually the law believes that the first person implicitly consented simply by the form of the language of the "offer" above and if the sums were larger this could hypothetically be the sort of thing that a lawsuit begins over.

The "consideration" idea is about this word "exchange" that I started off the last paragraph with, it says that contract law explicitly does not apply with things that are just given away for free. If you say "Hey after I mow my lawn tomorrow I'll mow yours", and your neighbor says "great!", and then something comes up tomorrow so that you have to cut the job short only mowing your lawn and not your neighbor's lawn, the law says that was not a contract and your neighbor cannot sue you to mow their lawn for free. How do we know it wasn't a proper contract where things were exchanged? Because we can see that you don't get anything out of it. But "get anything out of it" might get into very abstract territory: for example if you are known among your neighborhood for collecting the dead grass you've mowed and turning it into expensive compost, and that's the reasonable expectation, that could be consideration. At some point -- possibly presently, I haven't reviewed them for this post -- the Creative Commons licenses said something like "to the extent that this is a contract, the consideration for me is that I'm getting to see my work used by other people who I don't know."

This exception to contract law obviously does not apply to the terms-of-service agreements for paid services. It might hold if you are not notified about the terms of service prior to making the agreement, but US law tends to be a bit lax about the details here and usually says "well if you used the service anyway after you found out about the terms of service then you agreed to be bound by those terms." See the cases on "shrinkwrap licenses" for details.

Note also that most free-software copyright licenses and so forth are simply not contracts; that doesn't mean that they have no legal standing, but just that their legal standing isn't in contract law per se.

Arbitration started with the idea that there are two equal parties forming a contract, and both have an interest to come to a mutual agreement. This has spread even to consumer contracts.

For an example concerning customers of Well Fargo affected by fraud carried out by Wells Fargo, https://sites.duke.edu/thefinregblog/2016/11/23/how-wells-fa... .

> The scandal at Wells Fargo has placed big banks’ use of forced arbitration clauses under the microscope. When then Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf testified in front of the Senate Banking Committee shortly after the scandal broke, he was asked by Senator Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) whether his bank would continue to require customers to take all disputes with the bank to arbitration. Stumpf replied that he was “not an expert in that” and would therefore have to consult with his legal team. Brown made his views on the practice known during his opening remarks at the hearing, stating: “rather than letting fraud victims have their day in court, Wells Fargo forced customers to abide by the mandatory arbitration clauses in their real accounts. You heard that right – the bank invoked the fine print on a real account to block redress on a fake one which it had created.” The use of forced arbitration clauses even made its way to the presidential campaign trail, with Hillary Clinton pledging to “reign in that abuse.”

Theoretically, it's just as fair to be heard by a neutral third party, but the biggest difference is that if you agree to arbitration, there's no equivalent of a class-action complaint meaning each impacted individual would have to file an arbitration claim separately.