Originally published at: Uber also trying the Terms of Service defense - Boing Boing
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Don’t be surprised when a company with sketchy to non-existent ethics pulls a stunt like this.
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It’s somewhat less egregious than the Disney case (where the TOS for video streaming was completely unrelated to the event being sued over), but egregious in completely different way. Uber, like pretty much every other company with a TOS is saying, “Sure, you may have signed up with one set of terms of service, but we can replace them on a whim, and it doesn’t matter that the person who subsequently clicked on ‘I accept’ wasn’t you, because we made it clear they had changed. Also, it’s not like anyone reads these things - they’re designed to be impenetrable and too long to get through.”
I expect pretty much any company with the ability to do harm to us either has done this is or trying to figure out a way to do so. I wonder if the shift to online services for things that don’t remotely require them is part of this. A company may not be able to force a contract on you when you buy a physical product, but make customers go online to activate/access some product feature and voila, you can force a TOS on them!
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Got two words: HP printers. 
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Of course they used the TOS. That’s their entire purpose to begin with!
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With so much consolidation these days, hard to keep track of who you can and cannot sue.
I heard there was an executive at NBC who shot a lady but couldn’t get sued because she once used a General Electric microwave to heat up her breakfast burrito.
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Here are my terms and conditions for Uber:
Term: Guillotine
Condition: One (1) Head Shorter
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The court of appeals slides from the question of whether the contract was ever actually agreed to to discussing how the contract had some cool stuff in large print(while also eliding the question of whether the hyperlink where it could be found was accessed; Uber, naturally, has impeccable logs of checkboxes being checked…) with the practiced ease of a close up magician.
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What we really need is some legislation protecting consumers’ right to sue. Because arbitration clauses have become ubiquitous. And if you were talking about a true, negotiated contract with an arbitration clause, that would be fine. But these contracts aren’t negotiated. They’re very one sided contracts. The company writes all the terms in a manner most favorable to them, and then your option is to agree to those terms, or not use the service or product. The courts view terms of service as if they are simply normal contract terms of a contract negotiated by two parties in the way two parties would have negotiated the terms of a contract 100 years ago. The only way to get the courts to change this is to change the law. You don’t want to ban all arbitration clauses. They can be a really good way to keep from clogging the court system up with a lot of bullshit. In traditional contracts, they should absolutely still be allowed. In those, the parties have the opportunity to truly negotiate terms. And you wouldn’t even have to ban them for apps and services. Just give consumers the option. You can go to arbitration if you want, but allow them to sue if they don’t want to go to arbitration.
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Would not fly over here, tos are unenforceable.
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For small stuff, under $5k… I always sue the company in small claims court; regardless of what I agreed to in TOS or wherever…
…if they want to argue I agreed to arbitration, they have to send a lawyer or such to make that claim in person at the court.
75% they settle before the date; and even if they don’t, happy to waste paid corporate lawyer time.
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