In wake of data breach – Samsung forcing users to accept T&CS or risk their data
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thecrow.uk
Fun fact: much of this is because lawyers started telling people how to launch arbitration en-masse, and it turns out you cannot legally compel arbitration without also offering to pay for it. And since there's no class-action provision with most arbitration companies, it was actually more expensive to compel arbitration than to just take the class-actions.
Edit 1: Since people requested an example, here's Adobe's:
> The Notice of Claim must provide Adobe with fair notice of your identity, a description of the nature and basis of your Claim, and the relief you are seeking, including the specific amount of any monetary relief you are seeking, and cannot be combined with a Notice of Claim for other individuals.
Edit 2: Here's Venmo's, which is more comprehensive (https://venmo.com/legal/us-user-agreement/):
> You and PayPal agree that each of us may bring claims against the other only on an individual basis and not as a plaintiff or class member in any purported class or representative action or proceeding. Unless both you and PayPal agree otherwise, the arbitrator may not consolidate or join more than one person's or party's claims and may not otherwise preside over any form of a consolidated, representative or class proceeding. Also, the arbitrator may award relief (including monetary, injunctive and declaratory relief) only in favor of the individual party seeking relief and only to the extent necessary to provide relief necessitated by that party's individual claim(s). Any relief awarded cannot affect other PayPal or Venmo customers.
If, instead, claims could be combined then Adobe/PayPal/whoever could combine them all and presumably avoid paying to arbitrate each individually.
Well, I think it's safe to assume they don't, given companies started adding these terms after mass arbitration became popular.
As to how/why they don't, I'm not sure. But if I had to take a guess, I imagine motivations could include: (a) clogging the arbitration system to slow claims down to a crawl (since they can't be handled en masse), (b) making it difficult for every individual to demonstrate damages (since many people will not be able to prove actual harm), (c) forcing every individual to contribute significant time and effort into the process (which will not be worth it for many people, and practically impossible for many others).
Thank you for the examples by the way.
I do wonder if the Arbitration Society will find these terms acceptable. They have some ability to throw out unfair terms (in respect to arbitration).
this is coinbase:
https://www.coinbase.com/legal/user_agreement/united_states#...
> 7.2. Formal Complaint Process. ... first contact Coinbase through our support team to attempt to resolve any such dispute amicably. If we cannot resolve the dispute through Coinbase Support, you agree to use the Formal Complaint Process set forth below before filing any arbitration claim or small claims action as described further in Appendix 5 below.
I think hinge, discord, draftkings also did it, guessing many others
It looks to me like they never considered "opting out of arbitration for privacy reasons".
I don't understand how it would improve privacy in the first place?
Same reason why you'd probably pay less attention to no-parking signs if you knew you'd likely face a $50 fine for violating them, vs. if you had to show up to court and testify in front of a judge. Milder consequences hold you less accountable and incentivize you to be more careless with everything, including people's privacy.
I'd like to see what happens when someone in Afghanistan with a late-model Samsung android phone files a lawsuit against them in the Taliban's local sharia law court.
There is a story of a taliban fighter who had stolen from a local. The local opened a case at the local taliban court. Judge agreed with the local and whacked off the fighters hand right there.
Anyways, Samsung v Owner in a taliban court would be entertaining for sure.
> Nearly every person Shakira knew had a story about Dado. Once, his fighters demanded that two young men either pay a tax or join his private militia, which he maintained despite holding his official post. When they refused, his fighters beat them to death, stringing their bodies up from a tree. A villager recalled, “We went to cut them down, and they had been sliced open, their stomachs coming out.” In another village, Dado’s forces went from house to house, executing people suspected of being Taliban; an elderly scholar who’d never belonged to the movement was shot dead
>When I asked Shakira and other women from the valley to reflect on Taliban rule, they were unwilling to judge the movement against some universal standard—only against what had come before. “They were softer,” Pazaro, the woman who lived in a neighboring village, said. “They were dealing with us respectfully.” The women described their lives under the Taliban as identical to their lives under Dado and the mujahideen—minus the strangers barging through the doors at night, the deadly checkpoints.
>“My daughter wakes up screaming that the Americans are coming,” Pazaro said. “We have to keep talking to her softly, and tell her, ‘No, no, they won’t come back.’
So as a result you have people who don't agree with the Taliban ideologically, joining them just to keep American empowered war lords from killing civilians;
>But in countryside enclaves like Sangin the ceaseless killings of civilians led many Afghans to gravitate toward the Taliban. By 2010, many households in Ishaqzai villages had sons in the Taliban, most of whom had joined simply to protect themselves or to take revenge; the movement was more thoroughly integrated into Sangin life than it had been in the nineties. Now, when Shakira and her friends discussed the Taliban, they were discussing their own friends, neighbors, and loved ones.
Unfortunately these real stories aren't told. I consider myself a liberal, but the amount of liberals bemoaning America leaving Afghanistan was scary. People completely convinced they know the best thing for these people they never met, while American journalism made it clear that the death and rape of American rule in the Afghanistan countryside was not the feminist human rights- filled utopia some still think it was. When you see this, it makes sense why they so easily took over.
https://www.newyorker.com./magazine/2021/09/13/the-other-afg...
Ask somebody with an education from Kabul or Mazar-e-Sharif or Herat and you'll get a very different answer.
But yes, the justice system under the Karzai and then Ghani governments did become hopelessly corrupt and untrustworthy.
Wouldn't that depend on which legislation you live in?
If anyone from Samsung is reading this: please don't let the legal department have control over these kind of user-facing things.
I created it when I set up my current phone, but I'm not sure if it even adds anything over a Google account.
> Whether or not Samsung’s updated terms affect you, you’ll have to accept them in order to get the reassurance that no-one has logged into your Samsung account, and is currently monitoring your whereabouts using the “find my device” feature, checking out your frequent locations in “Places”, or using your profile pic to create fake accounts elsewhere. If you don’t want to accept terms and conditions foisted on you with the barest nod towards consent, well, that’s tough really.
Android users might unknowingly be victims of location monitoring by a hacker, and users are forced to accept new ToS just to verify whether this is or isn't happening.
Yuck, what a user-hostile privacy+security mess. A total failure on the "Keep-Users-Safe" front.
Anyway, I deleted my Samsung account mostly because of the annoying ToS updates I received frequently.
Kind a shame really, I very much liked Samsungs voice assistent. That was actually the main reason I created the Samsung account...
If it starts looking bad, I'll move the site onto a VPS
I guess I’ll just unplug the network table, assuming it can’t tunnel back up the HDMI cable to my Apple TV.
> “We respect the intellectual property rights of others. We may suspend or delete an account or stop providing all or part of our Services to an account if we reasonably believe that such an account has repeatedly infringed intellectual property rights.”
> The terms don’t say what constitutes reasonable belief.
You have no digital rights. And yes, it's a private company, blah blah blah. But you still have no digital rights. And most everything happens on the Internet now. Think.
I'd certainly prefer to choose a competitor that didn't have abusive terms, but I don't think the market would really reward a company that offers such. Most customers just wouldn't even realize they care about it, until it bites them.
Reasonable belief is a well understood concept. It doesn't need a definition in the terms of service. A judge reviewing a complaint by a party against Samsung will understand what "reasonable belief" means.
> But you still have no digital rights.
I think you're confused. It seems like you want Samsung to not have digital rights. You have digital rights, but not to use someone else's system in a manner which they don't want. If they operate a system, they have a right to specify how users can and can't utilize the system. You have the same rights.
Thus, "reasonable belief", while a legal term of art, is pretty meaningless to users.
> It seems like you want Samsung to not have digital rights.
I wrote nothing of the sort. But now that you put me on the spot, I'll tell you what I want: either that users get better access to due process, or that common carriers to have less power over what they carry (not zero power, just less), or both. While it's true that there are expensive, abusive users out there, we need to strike a better balance for all the users who aren't.
First, I'd like users to get a reasonable amount of time to challenge any suspensions or bans before they take effect, using an internal appeals process. Second, I'd like users to get a reasonable amount of time to further appeal lost appeals, again, internally. Thirdly, I'd like there to be some civil and criminal liability for making false reports, and some civil liability for common carriers acting on false reports. I.e., the costs to common carriers of acting rashly should be a great deal greater than they are currently.
So YES, Facebook should need to give the person the right to defend themselves before acting taking action because of _alleged_ child porn.
Let's turn your boogie man around. What should happen if your small business page that you were using to drive revenue out of which you're paying a small payroll were taken down due to false or otherwise incorrect claims that you're violating the hosting company's ToS? You'd take that lying down and say "well, I must have done something!"? Obviously not, not if you knew you hadn't "done something".
I don't like your approach to debating these things. It feels like it's not in good faith. I put effort into my replies and you come back with boogie man retorts.
Also, not all of the things described even count as "forced to keep serving child porn". For instance, civil liability for acting on false reports doesn't force Facebook to keep serving child porn.
I'm responding to this part:
> First, I'd like users to get a reasonable amount of time to challenge any suspensions or bans before they take effect, using an internal appeals process
The terms of service under discussion are about copyright infringement. The content itself is not illegal, and the dispute is about the rights to post it. Two very different things.
And, maybe the child porn isn't actually child porn. Maybe it is totally legal, consenting adults having sex on video, but the adult just looks like a child. Yes, this has actually happened (article in Spanish): https://archive.ph/20140811233956/http://www.eldia.com.ar/ed...
The porn star had to travel to the court to testify that she was 19 during the filming of the scene, otherwise the person may have received 20 years in jail for possessing "child porn". Posting that video on facebook wouldn't be illegal, it would just be against the ToS.
The proposed system is about who has the rights to post something, and a delay while that's figured out. However /nobody/ has the right to post cp, as it is /always/ illegal.
It is possible for something to mistakenly be identified as CP, so you're right there. I'm arguing based on your original supposition that it /is/ CP.
Also regarding
> I'm responding to this part:
>> First, I'd like users to get a reasonable amount of time to challenge any suspensions or bans before they take effect, using an internal appeals process
Nobody says it has to stay up during the appeals process, just that account suspensions and punishment have to wait. It's possible to have different takedown policies based on the level of accusation.
Never thought I'd see the day people would be arguing vehemently for the rights of multi-billion dollar international conglomerates with an army of highly paid legal staff so that they can arbitrarily mistreat consumers. Has the world gone mad?
And I'm merely reminding OP that companies, as just a group of people with a common goal, have rights too, because OP seemed to have forgotten that. I'm not out here shouting it in the drive thru line at a Wendy's.
Users have almost no way to enforce what little the ToSes grant them, and no injunctive relief w/o a great deal of effort beyond the reach of most users.
> And I'm merely reminding OP that companies, as just a group of people with a common goal, have rights too, because OP seemed to have forgotten that.
Stop ascribing to me things I did not write and about which I've already corrected you. Keep things civil please.
I guess normies will believe it ... :(