UK WiFi Company Uses Overlong TOS To Trick Hotspot Users Into Cleaning Toilets, Hugging Stray Cats
from the sign-your-life-away dept
So we've talked for years about how overlong terms of service contracts that nobody reads are used to eliminate your rights in numerous ways. That includes stripping away your legal rights and forcing you to engage in binding arbitration, which results in the company-employed arbitrator ruling in their employer's favor a vast majority of the time. In fact Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web, recently cited these overlong and misleading contracts as one of the biggest threats to the health and utility of his invention.
Every so often we'll see a company conduct an experiment to demonstrate the stupidity of long-normalized behavior, like the company in 2010 that got users to sign off on selling their soul. Taking a cue out of that playbook, UK WiFi hotspot operator Purple recently did something similar, burying a provision in their terms of service requiring that customers engage in 1,000 hours of menial labor if they wanted to access the internet.
Purple currently provides hotspot connectivity to Legoland, Outback Steakhouse and Pizza Express, and stated in a blog post that they provided patrons with a wonderful array of possibilities in terms of how to pay down their community service time, including:
The company says it ultimately found that over 22,000 users blindly signed off on the requirement during the two week period during which the experiment was conducted. It should go without saying that they won't be enforcing the rules, but wanted to simply get a little free press while highlighting the stupidity of overlong TOS. Impressively, they note that during the two-week trial, just one user actually noticed what he was signing off on:
"Don’t worry, we aren’t going to round up these individuals and ask them to don their rubber gloves and repay the community debt. The real reason behind our experiment is to highlight the lack of consumer awareness when signing up to use free WiFi. All users were given the chance to flag up the questionable clause in return for a prize, but remarkably only one individual, which is 0.000045% of all WiFi users throughout the whole two-weeks, managed to spot it."
While these pranks go a long way in highlighting the problem, there's few if any real efforts to actually do much of anything about it. We desperately need simpler, cleaner terms of service updated for the digital age, but since companies adore using these lengthy, confusing contracts to protect themselves, hamstring your product ownership rights and make additional revenue, nothing much ever changes.
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Filed Under: hotspots, terms of service, tos, uk, wifi
Companies: purple
Reader Comments
Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
Hardly a new idea.
People just sign whatever. I mean, there has been an Internet subscription trap fad for a while until legislators stepped in and made it harder for stupid people to agree to atrocious conditions without looking at them.
Microsoft's Windows 10 privacy agreement runs over 20 pages. Don't tell me that a significant fraction of "agreeing" people actually read this through.
Basically, those agreements are used to get back into the lawless territory of "you don't know what you are getting into", just with "and it's your own fault, prrbrbrbrbblll!" on top.
These "agreements" are not about getting you to agree to anything but about subjugating you. Of course, they usually come with binding arbitration.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re:
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Re:
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Even Top Judges
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Problems with "Highlighting" the Problem
I understand why they didn't force people to go through with it, but in a way it might be better if they did.
Right now their actions come off as a joke. "Oh, we got you. Think about it just a bit more next time." And when that happens, people kind of smile about it and move on.
But the reality is that there's been some success in the past suggesting that the TOS might be legally enforceable. As it stands, most newsites are going to say "yeah, that's a problem," and then just move on. Most consumers are going to laugh and then forget about it.
If they had actually rounded up a bunch of people and forced them to clean a sidewalk, as unjustifiable and cruel as it might be, somebody in Congress would be talking about this right now.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Problems with "Highlighting" the Problem
Just for your infomation, there are more countries in the world than the USA, and in this case the problem comes under the U.K parliament.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Problems with "Highlighting" the Problem
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Problems with "Highlighting" the Problem
http://ec.europa.eu/consumers/consumer_rights/index_en.htm
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Problems with "Highlighting" the Problem
I guess the question is “to what extent should it put users off?” You get sellers on eBay who put stuff in their listings like “sold as seen” and “buyer responsible for postal losses.” Those meet neither eBay’s T&Cs nor UK law. I try to avoid such eBay sellers because they’re either abusive or stupid, and dealing them could be a lot of hassle. But, if they’re the only game in town, I have bought from such sellers knowing that, if something does go wrong, eBay, PayPal, my credit card issuer or the county court would make it right.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Problems with "Highlighting" the Problem
Also, a judge could rule the TOS to be unconscionable and therefore null and void.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Problems with "Highlighting" the Problem
Not.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Re: Problems with "Highlighting" the Problem
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
The world needs a reverse-EULA.
I wonder if anyone has actually done this? Composed a beginning-supplier license agreement (or BSLA for short) and sent it off via email to a company who's product they're interested in buying?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: The world needs a reverse-EULA.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: The world needs a reverse-EULA.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Tricked?
If they really want the TOS to demonstrate just how onerous a TOS can be they should FORBID the hugging of kitties.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Long TOS = Fraud IOW
My fellow americans may have noticed there's a black box with the significant terms in basically every credit card offer that fills their mailbox. That's there because the law *finally* caught up with credit card companies writing TOS that no one would read.
Part two of this is to take experiments like these to court when challenging a long TOS as totally unenforceable.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
And did they try to enforce this provision? Did they harrass people and file lawsuits?
No they did not. Because they know as well as the rest of us that that sort of shit in click-wrap simply doesn't fly. We don't read it because we don't have to.
And binding arbitration is not 'in-house'.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
Is that what your straw man called it?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
really...
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Nice story, but still no solution
Is anyone really going to read the TOS? And if they do read it, I doubt anyone will think "Hey, I don't want to hug a dog. This Wifi isn't for me"!
In other words, this is a nice story, but it still doesn't address whether a click-through TOS is a legally binding contract. Sure, the company could argue that hugging a dog is a small price for getting free Wifi, but still.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Examples of good TOS
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Damn
[ link to this | view in chronology ]