this post was submitted on 05 Dec 2025
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I agree with you that this should be illegal. I expect this was in the terms of service, though. Since we have no laws restricting this kind of bullshit, the company can argue that they're within their rights.
We need some real legislation around privacy. It's never going to happen, but it needs to. We need a right to anonymity but that is too scary for advertisers and our police state.
Terms of service need to stop being treated like law.
They're not law as long as you can afford the lawyers and legal costs to fight them. Which is, of course, the problem and the system working as designed.
Pre-Trump47 I was in the first camp. I'm not going to lie about how long it took me to figure it out. It was always obvious that the system was broken, but I'll admit that for a long time I was foolish enough to believe the system worked well enough that it was worth trying to fix, that the fundamentals were sound and there was enough good there to want to save it.
Recent events have shown and continue to show me how naive I've been, none of this is an accident, it's all part of the poker game and we're all putting in most of the chips that keep it going whether we know it or not. And I have to be thankful that Russia, China, USA, Israel, Europe, and even my own country's governments have made this all so abundantly clear that even I (and hopefully a lot of other people) can finally see it. I'm joining the resistance. Fuck the system and all the crooked people involved in it, it's time for a cyberpunk revolution.
Just because something's written in the terms of service, doesn't mean it's legal.
Thats why any good terms of service have clauses that say if any part of this is deemed unenforceable or not legal or whatever, the rest of the terms remain intact, as I guess at some point in time, people were getting entire documents thrown out based off 1 thing.
And just because it's legal doesn't mean it's ethical.
While I expect the same, there's also just a reasonablility standard. If Meta and Google updated their TOS to say that users agreed to become human chattle slaves to mine cobalt and forfeit their rights, no court (...right, SCOTUS?...right?) would uphold that. A TOS is a contract, but it's mostly for the protection of companies from liability. Takign active steps to brick someone's device over the device not connecting to it's C2 server (the company had zero evidence this was done intentionally and a router firewall misconfiguration could just have easily done the same thing), is IMO something that should result in a lawsuit.
I agree with you. The problem is that lawsuits cost money. Fighting the company on this requires the right plaintiff who is willing to risk money on the problem.
How often are the terms of service evident at the time of purchase? It's unreasonable to assume at the checkout that the price is only for a limited time of use. I doubt the put it on the box or on the Amazon page when you purchased stuff like this. Are you supposed to buy it and then return it after reading the fine print in the instruction booklet after opening it up?
When an authoritarian country does it, everyone goes crazy
When a company does it to make more money and take more control, it's just business as usual.
Just like work. If a government tried to treat us like that, we would have a revolution tomorrow. Yet, we've all been groomed into just accepting it.
Unless you are to this terms before you bought the thought I don't see how that's a valid contract.