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Comment by sph | Hacker News Reader

This entire saga could be reframed as "5-day old Reddit account wildly misinterprets Vultr ToS, causing drama-thirsty social media users to spread it far and wide, generating the company a ton of negative press." — Vultr has released a statement explaining, they clarified their point yet the news is still going around the block.

Here's a moderator comment on the original post: https://old.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1bouuv7/warning...

Those Terms and Conditions could have been clearer, but no one has betrayed anybody, no one is stealing your hosted content and nobody would have said anything if its was not for a redditor with far too much time in their hands trying to interpret legalese, badly.

Disclaimer: I have never used Vultr, I do not care what happens to them because of this, but everybody would benefit from taking every drama-du-jour with a pinch of salt, especially when it comes from a new reddit account.

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From the article in The Register:

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

Making a mistake by stuffing their terms of use with vague boilerplate legalese which could apply to anything is one thing, not taking responsibility for that mistake and clearly stating "we made a mistake" instead just means they ended up rubbing in the stain. People are forgiving of mistakes; hubris, not so much.

As others have pointed out: that line of text was not harmless, and whether you have a law degree or not is not the issue there. It was not malicious in intent, but it was wrong and overreaching nonetheless.

> It was not malicious in intent

We do not know if it was malicious in intent or not.

It is entirely possible that they felt that they could allow all of their private servers to be crawled by whoever was willing to pay - perhaps with terms to make it palatable (only be used for LLM weights, no human will see it, content may not be regurgitated wholesale, etc).

It could be that this change in the ToS was made to cover their backs. In fact - they may actually have already crawled all of the servers.

They claim this was not their intent. But when it comes to abusing PII that is hovered up by providers, I have been burned too often to assume a mistake.

Caveat Emptor

Can you name one example where the context was not someone who was handling/processing/had the data as a part of their platform (i.e. FB) but rather a hosting provider where you've been burned assuming?

If a ToS is going to be a contract, it has to be interpretable by the person hitting 'agree', no? If someone is confused about what it means and reaches out to the company and they respond by locking the user out of their account which they use to generate their livelihood, it has stopped being an 'oopsie' and become a 'we don't care about our customers, we only care what they give us and will use strangely worded legalese and extortion to get it'.

The response of 'why would they ever assume bad intention by a startup tech company which pivoted recently to focus on AI offerings' crocodile tears just makes it worse.

At this point, barring the existence of an impeccable and long-running reputation, if you assume that any place you store your data is not going to screw you the moment they can to make a buck, then you are hopelessly naive.

>If a ToS is going to be a contract, it has to be interpretable by the person hitting 'agree', no?

That is why other counterpart would also hire a lawyer.

Get a life. You can’t go through an average day without using a dozen services that you’d have to hire a lawyer to interpret their TOS.

If you want to hire a full-time personal counsel, go for it.

The rest of us insist on something else. Understandable agreements is something that should be forced on all companies unless we can perhaps win the fight against TOS being legally enforceable in the first place. That would be the best world.

The issue of legalese in ToS is the same issue of "bad code" or "bad engineering". The law is just another system, another conceptual language of communication, except one filled with way more vaguaries, edge cases and grey areas than any software we make.

Companies like they do not want to pay for "good engineering" don't want to pay for "understandable contracts".

Then don't blame the customer for misinterpreting it when it is done terribly.

Except paying lawyers $400+/h rarely results in "understandable contracts".

The legal industry is self-creating this issue because that makes their services more necessary.

It certainly is an example of the agency problem.

However the company itself doesn't want to allocate resources regardless of the actual cost.

Because regardless at your $/hr, a contract that protects the company in the same way and is understandable by the user takes MORE HOURS, than one that just protects the company and fuck the user.

Lots of these lawyers at companies with internal council could do this are a resource that is over utilized already. There's no room for more hours.

>The legal industry is self-creating this issue because that makes their services more necessary.

I guess that is similar to software industry creating insane complexity to make their job more necessary.

I don't think most people would be able to afford an emotional support lawyer

>if its was not for a redditor with far too much time in their hands trying to interpret legalese, badly.

>Those Terms and Conditions could have been clearer

Sounds like the issue was exactly because the ToS wasn't clear which is not the fault of a redditor.

That’s what happens when your TOS are written for lawyers but then ask non-lawyers to accept them to create an account.

It was a fiasco of their own making.

Nobody likes legalese so leadership teams just ask legal and ship it. But there's another way, you can just write what you actually want. You can say "we want to be able to use the text content of any post in tool X to train a model".

Yes, you'll need to update your ToS more often if you just say what you want to do instead of "bulletproofing" something forever by making it so abstract it applies to anything in perpetuity - but if you want that, the price you pay is that people will sometimes call you out on it, misinterpretation or not.

> trying to interpret legalese, badly.

Where I live you cannot enter a contract that you cannot be expected to have understood. In fact TOS that are not written in clear understandable language are generally considered to be invalid by courts.

If that many people are misunderstanding the TOS, that's a bad sign.

> generating the company a ton of negative press

I mean, I've heard of them now, and hadn't before, and had assumed by the name it was some dumb Buzzfeed-like site. Possibly they'll get some extra business out of it.

Fair enough, though it would be a VERY risky marketing strategy to create a sockpuppet Reddit account to scare senseless their most naive customers, just to generate some publicity :)

While I don’t expect the company to do such PR themselves, from my experience in China it is indeed the case that many major public figures or products began their explosive growth from negative comments like this

really? it was captured like quoted: https://web.archive.org/web/20240305043015/https://www.vultr...

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