rchandraonline's Journal: read your agreements carefully

Reminiscent of Jimmy on "South Park" starting a joke, I feel like saying, "Have you heard about this?" Recently Ellen DeGeneres sobbingly opens her show with a plea to animal rescuers to hand back a dog to her hairdresser's family. OK, call me crazy, but how many of you actually read those terms of service, acceptable use policies, privacy policies to which one is supposed to agree as a condition of using a service/website/whatever? I do. Precisely twice I can remember in my adult life have I bypassed that and gone for it.

Truly, when it came time to roll over a 401(k) into a self-directed IRA (it was mandatory), I really probably should have read all the "fine print" before signing the contract with this one investment firm. I should have not because anything onerous has happened, but because this was substantial money I was putting in the care of someone else. The reason I didn't do so is this investment house was recommended by a very dear friend of mine, and I assumed he read this contract and found nothing wrong with it. But it is what it is now; for better or worse, I have put my signature to a document that, for all I know, could say that two days from now, I forfeit everything I gave them with no recourse. I highly doubt it says something that ridiculous, but it very well could because I never read it.

Another time I did this was recently when I had to fly to attend computer training for my job. I got damn sick and tired of selecting this and that about my flight on the United Airlines site. I knew if I would just register with their site and get a United Miles number, I could have easy access to the information I wanted without having to click through 3 or 4 questions. But when it came to the little checkbox on the Web form that says something like "I have read, understood, and agree to the agreements/policies/etc. for this site," I held my nose, checked the checkbox, and clicked on the submit button. For all I know, they could have something in there that demands I forfeit my computer and all its peripherals to them, or I must travel 5 times within a year or be subject to a million dollar lawsuit, or <insert ridiculous demand here>.

In both my cases, I made the broad assumption that none of these large, large companies would put ridiculous or stupid stuff in these agreements because if they did, they'd shortly be out of business because customers would flock in droves to other firms once someone like me read these docs and started to caution the public about just what they say (especially in this Internet and blogging age, let alone the longstanding tradition of going to any and all of my local investigative reporters in whatever media).

Some of the agreements I've slogged through are real peaches too. Take the ToS and AUP of your typical ISP, and in particular the one for Verizon DSL. They are so laden with phrases like "including but not limited to" and "at our sole discretion." What it's basically telling everyone is kiss our ring (or worse), bend over, and thank us hourly for "servicing" you, or we'll rip your service out so fast the cable will slice your nose off as we're retracting it to our wirecenter, and there's not a damn thing you can really do about it either, because you agreed to this. It's the classic Lily Tomlin as the operator, saying we're the phone company. Life becomes really difficult (at least compared with everyone else who holds their nose, kisses their ring, and cowers in fear) when they have one over a barrel like that. They can point to anything they want, or really nothing at all, and cut me off because they can point to the phrases "but not limited to" or "at our sole discretion."

Well, I've digressed a bit. Here's the bigger takeaway point:

If Ellen would have just not handwaved her dog agreement, there would be a lot less grief for her, a lot less grief for her hairdresser, and a lot less grief for the hairdresser's young family.

If press accounts are to be believed, it clearly states there is no gifting of the animal(s) to third parties. What part of that is not so clear? Did Ellen believe the hairdresser was also a worker for the animal shelter? Somehow, I really, really doubt that. It's exceedingly simple: if you're told you don't give the animal to anyone but the shelter people, you don't give the animal to anyone but the shelter people! How hard is that to grasp? Well, it's really hard to grasp when you just handwave the contract.

I also hate to say it, but the EULA for some of Microsoft's latest works is far worse. Many other sites and blogs say far more than I could in this comparatively tiny space, but suffice it to say they say basically you're a criminal, and you probably can't access your precious data (at least that which is stored/retreived/managed through Microsoft's software, including Office and the OS itself), unless you can nearly continuously prove you're NOT a criminal (think activation and WGA). They also make it illegal in most versions of Vista to run it virtualized. So...let's see...you're going to demand I buy a separate system just for your stinkin' OS instead of running it under a virtual computer along with several other environments (which are virtualized). No, I don't suppose you're going to compensate me either for the time and effort it'll take to restore a Vista system to an exact previous state, not to mention paying for a copy of True Image or Ghost to do so (a revert to a previous virtual machine state is darn close to instantaneous).

An overshadowing point of this is, with few exceptions, we all do some things on occasion that we know to the letter of the agreemnent are wrong, but we do them anyway. Verizon are stupid to make their customers agree to some of their terms (so YOU, Verizon, say this posting I wrote is defamatory, but others, including me, don't see it that way). As long as I'm not using any more copies of Office, XP, Vista or whatever, there's no reason I shouldn't be able to run your software under QEmu, VMWare, or KVM (and with no fear of losing all my hard work). Ellen's hairdresser and her (his?) daughters are probably just fine people.

Bottom line though...unless you're masochistic and you really WANT to have your life have more angst, you really can't just handwave those agreements.