Hacker News Reader

Comment by DoofusOfDeath | Hacker News Reader

It seems to me that the U.S. is ripe for an updating of its consumer protection laws. Particularly w.r.t. shrink-wrap license and other attempts to impose unwelcome terms that the buyer didn't know about at the time of the sale.

I imagine our existing consumer-protection laws were passed over the opposition of monied interests. If so, I wonder how close we are to having the political will do to do that again.

View on HN

At a minimum, a "ban" of the Oculus account should also include an immediate refund of any and all purchases. It's absolutely ridiculously to think they can just keep all that money while depriving a customer of software licenses they paid for!

Not even that is good enough, a ban on an account should have a VERY high bar, and that bar needs to be highly regulated. Right now it's just games, maybe movies, but it could apply to all kinds of software and apps... and this stuff is important. You can't cut a person off from being able to purchase and use their puchased software. It's too important.

Arbitrary account bans already impact more substantive business services. It's not that rare to read of situations where small businesses have had their Amazon stores, Gsuite, Google Ads, or Google Store (publisher) accounts arbitrarily banned with no recourse.

heck I don't understand why Facebook doesn't exclude accounts linked to a headset from bot bans, max 1 per headset of course. If fake new Facebook accounts are worth $400+ to bad actors we are in bad shape.

Indeed, and it would force Facebook have some skin in the game because banning would cost them real money. I'm betting once each ban starts to cost them hundreds of $ they will start to at least put some human eyes in front of it before the ban hammer comes down.

I agree, and I think there's kind of an elephant in the room with respect to all Terms of Service Agreements.

Anybody with a mobile phone (as well as a plethora of other products) has inevitably agreed to dozens of pages of legal doctrine which they don't understand, any probably wouldn't without a competent lawyer on hand. But nevertheless, every minor service update, we all hit "I Accept", despite having no understanding of what we've agreed to.

Is this not massively problematic? What happens if a company actually tries to draw significant action against consumers using the terms of service as their contract?

My guess re. 'how close': approximately 48 quintillion light years away. The US has been corporatist for a long while and is blatantly so since Citizens United - the idea that a consumer protection law would pass in this environment is as 'possible' as the world taking climate change seriously at any point before we are all boiled alive.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com