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Comment by sandworm101 | Hacker News Reader

>> Tile says that any individual convicted of using Tile devices to illegally track another individual without their consent will be fined $1 million, wording that is in the Tile terms of service.

Lol. Which lawyer came up with that one? You simply are not allowed to implement punishment fines in contracts. They should have instead couched this in indemnity language, a statement that the user shall reimburse Tile for legal expensive should a stalked person rightly sue them.

Of course by the time someone is actually convicted of stalking they aren't likely to have a spare 1mil lying around. That's why criminal defense attorneys demand money up front. Nothing will ever come of this scare tactic.

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Yeah, I'm not a lawyer and even I knew you can't do that shit. Not straight-up punitive fines like that. You don't even need to have any familiarity with contract law to figure this out—those provisions would be everywhere if they had any chance in hell of holding up. They're not, so, they must not hold up. QED.

What's the difference between a punitive fine and something like a late fee?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquidated_damages

"Under the common law, liquidated damages may not be set so high that they are penalty clauses rather than fair compensation... Generally, at common law, a liquidated damages clause will not be enforced if its purpose is to punish the party in breach rather than to compensate the injured party"

If Tile provides information to the police to help catch a stalker, they can't claim their reputational damage is $1m. Actually, even their statements in this thread show that it's intended as a punishment.

A fee is (somehow) linked to costs suffered because of the breech. If you return a rental car late then you have to pay for the extra time, along with any other incidental expenses suffered. A "late fee" might cover the costs associated with them providing a different car to customers who had booked your car. Or, if they had no other cars, whatever they had to do to satisfy those other customers. You are allowed to identify so-called liquidated damages in a contract. You aren't allowed to create a lottery whereby you can demand millions from customers who make small mistakes.

Double-especially true in TOS that aren't even properly negotiated. There's a bit more leeway if it's, say, two businesses hammering out a real contract, a true meeting of the minds, but, in a display of uncharacteristic sanity on the part of the US legal system, these kinds of boilerplate take-it-or-leave-it "contracts" usually aren't allowed to get as out-there as the real thing can (though even in those cases, something like this would be pretty damn iffy)

Life360/Tile CEO. I came up with this idea, not our lawyers, as they would be the first to say it is unclear how enforceable this is. But what IS clear, is that based on our new TOS, and because this is opt-in, we definitely could take a flyer in court, and who knows?

Do you want us to unleash millions of dollars of lawyers on you? I don't think many people will want to find out. I genuinely believe this plus a ID scanning will be a huge deterrent. Stalkers will go buy $30 real time stealth GPS trackers on Amazon instead.

>> Do you want us to unleash millions of dollars of lawyers on you? I don't think many people will want to find out

Assuming you don't mean that as a threat to me or anyone else posting here on HN about your product ... lawyers are not caged dogs to unleashed at people who displease you. Even the most expensive of them will not fight a lost cause, one that might humiliate them in the eyes of other lawyers. Not for a corporate tech client. This isn't a typo or other laughable but forgivable error. This is contracts 101 stuff.

And statements made online about this contract language would probably come up in subsequent cases. The fact that the CEO thinks the language unenforceable, and by implication therefore never intended to enforce it, will not help you should this ever be before a judge.

To be clear, what I am saying is it is NOT clear how enforceable it would be vs saying we know it is not enforceable. Our terms also specify we can only collect after a criminal conviction. The press writeup did not go into detail. We've thought this through quite a bit, and it is in a grey area.

Without defending stalking: I want you to follow sound legal principles rather than throw money at courts to cause people trouble This is a repulsive and disingenuous tactic, you appear to be willfully ignoring the spirit of the law and using your power to manipulate the system instead.

This response makes me lose confidence in your company's ethics.

I understand the dilemma you're in. You have a product with a clear, legitimate use case that would provide a valuable function to millions of users. On the other hand, even a single instance of a stalker using the device to stalk and harm someone would be a tragedy, and create a firestorm of bad publicity. Unfortunately, I don't think this solution really resolves the dilemma.

Yea, it is challenging. We are prepared to deal with outliers, even though I agree a single one is a tragedy. I do think the friction we are adding will make it far more likely that a stalker will just by an anonymous real time GPS tracker with an LTE connection vs use Tile devices.

> “ID scanning will be a huge deterrent”

Oh, this will be a huge deterrent, alright, just probably not in the way that you’re thinking.

Seems more like advertising that your device can be used for covert tracking/stalking without overtly doing so to me. An obviously nonsense clause that will be picked up by the media and provide exactly the coverage they are looking for, all while ostensibly being the good guys

Yep.

I wonder if it serves any psychological purpose. I think not but I honestly don't know. Maybe it would scare a few would-be-stalkers from doing it... but I doubt it.

it'll (slightly) scare folks who don't think too deeply about it or don't have lots of legal knowledge/experience, but not the folks most likely to use them for illicit tracking. all it does is alert them to do their tracking more surreptitiously and perhaps to cook up an alibi beforehand.

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