Cloud host Vultr rips user data ownership clause from ToS after web outrage | Hacker News Reader

Cloud host Vultr rips user data ownership clause from ToS after web outrage

theregister.com

85 pointsgnabgib20 comments

I'm a pretty happy Vultr customer. One of their engineers spent time troubleshooting an IPv6/BGP related issue eventually isolating my vps to one of their backbone providers that still had a clear path to my home.

Spectrum on the other hand refused to even acknowledge that I had an issue despite me having reams of traceroutes demonstrating that my home connection had disappeared into an IPv6 black hole for a very large portion of the internet at large.

So yeah - the company I have <$50/mo spend with cared more about making things work than the company I pay a lot more for an internet connection.

So... I'm going to give Vultr a pretty big pass on this goof up.

That's a great way to look at it and very considerate of you. I'd still read any future ToS changes with a magnifying glass. Hope that it's a one-time mistake. Verify that it's not the start of a trend.

Big +1 to being a happy customer. I’ve been switching a bunch of my linode VPSs to vultr and have been quite happy with the cost and performance.

This has been the first I’ve seen anything negative in my experiences with them. Will also continue to use them given they removed this.

I'm also a happy Vultr customer for many years. The original story was a bummer because it had me thinking where I should take my business and how much of a bother it would be to relocate it. I was perfectly set on doing so.

This later reversal news means I don't have to now. But.. I'm not giving them a big pass. I will look at their services and ToS more carefully from now on out, and have a migration plan in place in case of future hijinks.

Same. Quite happy overall. Had a major issue a couple weeks ago when docker hub registry banned some Vultr IPs (v6) and I could not deploy anything on my kubernetes cluster.

It took a while, but things got resolved. Vultr's CTO even looked at the issue personally which is a really good sign in a company when top management stay in touch with customers, even small ones.

I'm with the parent here, Vultr has been awesome for me and I'm a very happy customer. Very glad to see them walk this back.

That said, while IANAL, I have been involved in a relatively large number of contract negotiations. The TOS were ambiguous enough that our collective interpretation was almost certainly enforceable, if it came to that.

The problem is that the definition of "user content" was so broad as to allow for almost no distinction between private and public uses of the data.

So it's irksome that their lawyers blamed us non-lawyers, when from my perspective it was clearly Vultr's lawyers who failed here. But nevertheless I'm gonna take the win :-)

They wanted to cover their community forums and they ended up covering everything. Funny. Legal documents are such a god damned minefield.

Ah that makes a lot more sense. It seemed so outrageous that they would try to claim ownership of all hosted user generated content, but that makes sense that it was targeted at their community forum, and then misinterpreted.

It wasn't misinterpreted. It was miswritten. They might have intended to only cover their forums, but what they actually wrote gave them the keys to the kingdom.

And this should never be ignored.

'We meant it to mean something, but it was worded in a way that either meant something else, or appeared to most people to mean something else' is not a problem with the people who tell you that they will drop your business because of that. In a competitive market you have to appeal to your customers, not the other way around.

Also the part about 'we only made the pop-up because of an unrelated licensing change' means 'you wouldn't have even noticed if we hadn't told you by accident'. Do you think that is good thing?

Related, some of that outrage:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39836495

Context:

Vultr is now claiming full perpetual commercial rights over all hosted content

https://old.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1bouuv7/warning...

and the corresponding HN discussion was here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39836495

Vultr has now published a blog post saying they will remove that part,

https://www.vultr.com/news/A-Note-About-Vultrs-Terms-of-Serv...

Some lawyer put that there as boilerplate and nobody caught it.

People Power! The system worked (this time).

> "It's clearly causing confusion for some portion of users. We recognize that the average user doesn't have a law degree," Kardwell said.

What the hell. No, Kardwell. We weren't confused. We read your words, understood the implications, and complained. It was because were weren't confused.

"The customers are too stupid to understand." Yeah, that surely must be it.

From the article:

> User content was defined as "the information, text, opinions, messages, comments, audio visual works, motion pictures, photographs, animation, videos, graphics, sounds, music, software, apps, and any other content or material that you or your end users submit, upload, post, host, store, or otherwise make available" using Vultr's resources.

"...that you or your end users... host". Maybe Vultr had nothing but the best intentions, but their legalese was catastrophically bad. If Vultr truly meant well, then the only people confused were their legal team who drafted a ToS that didn't reflect their intent.

> "It's clearly causing confusion for some portion of users. We recognize that the average user doesn't have a law degree,"

I'm no mechanic either but I can identify a flat tire when I see one.

Wut! Did they really have a social network style ToS on a hosting platform? That’s wild!

ONLY "for purposes of providing the services to you."

> You hereby grant to Vultr a non-exclusive, perpetual, irrevocable, royalty-free, fully paid-up, worldwide license (including the right to sublicense through multiple tiers) to use, reproduce, process, adapt, publicly perform, publicly display, modify, prepare derivative works, publish, transmit and distribute each of your User Content, or any portion thereof, in any form, medium or distribution method now known or hereafter existing, known or developed, and otherwise use and commercialize the User Content in any way that Vultr deems appropriate, without any further consent, notice and/or compensation to you or to any third parties, *for purposes of providing the services to you.*

That's such an enormously huge loophole. A literal interpretation is that if I host a server there, they can feed my hard drive ("you or your end users submit, upload, post, host, store, or otherwise make available") into an LLM and sell it back to me, and, coincidentally, anyone else.

Maybe that's not what they intend. However, that's what it says.

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