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Comment by krustyburger | Hacker News Reader

Most users do not research the names of parent companies.

They also rarely read TOS, freely give out many pieces of identifying information without reading privacy policies, and, as you said, do virtually no research on a company or their ownership.

At some point consumers have to get some of the blame here, right?

Most TOSes and privacy policies require a post-graduate level of education and several hours to properly understand - and that's for just one of the many services we interact with daily. I don't think it's reasonable to put that on the consumer.

So do we throw out all basic contract law because of this?

I'm not being facetious here. I actually think that contract law has significant problem in that it assumes a level of informed consent the average person cannot give when dealing with corporations that have specialized legal teams. It is one thing for two neighbors to enter into a contract since it is a meeting of near equal minds. But the average individual and the entire legal team of some large corporation? I would find a child entering into a contract with an adult to be more likely to have informed consent.

“Basic” is a relative term. Any contract that was entered into by a party who did not understand the contract and could not reasonably be expected to be able to understand the contract should not be enforceable.

But the services will still have to do this, even without data collection. Otherwise, they'll get an incedent like when that lady sued mcdonalds for hot coffee being hot and demanded some stupid sum of money. The legal dept will come up with some crazy ten-pager even if there's not this data sniffing in it.

> Otherwise, they'll get an incedent like when that lady sued mcdonalds for hot coffee being hot and demanded some stupid sum of money.

Oooooh, you fell hook line and sinker for corporate PR.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald%27s_Restau...

> Liebeck was hospitalized for eight days while she underwent skin grafting, followed by two years of medical treatment.

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/12/16/13971482/...

> Liebeck didn’t want to go to court. She just wanted McDonald’s to pay her medical expenses, estimated at $20,000. McDonald’s only offered $800, leading her to file a lawsuit in 1994.

> hospitalized for eight days

Right, but she was scalded by hot liquid. It is customary for hot coffee to be pretty hot, even close to boiling. I don't see how that was "corporate PR", or how McDonald's was at fault. The fact that others held coffee at 140 and McD held it at 180 doesn't sound like a reason it owed six figures.

> She just wanted McDonald's to pay her medical expenses

Right, but she spilled the coffee. Why is McDonald's liable for her slip-up? The jury decided that the warning on the cup wasn't large enough, but I'm not sure that makes sense as people habitually ignore warnings any way. They're printed on so many things that it's hard not to. I doubt a larger warning would have made a difference.

This is like some one purchasing a knife, cutting himself, and complaining that the manufacturer is at fault because there was not a sufficiently large warning that "knife is sharp".

Imagine if food was mechanical. Imagine if there was a switch that could be flipped changing it from edible to inedible and dangerous.

Drinking coffee at 180 degrees could kill you.

There are plenty of dangerous things we purchase. Imagine if there was a switch that could be flipped changing it from edible to inedible and dangerous.

Not cooking pork to 165 could kill you. I still think it's BS to sue a pork mfg.

But you only know that because someone analysed user behaviour, so...

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