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Comment by crhulls | Hacker News Reader

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.

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>> 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.

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