Shocking. I used to work there, big media company. The main business was the newspaper and magazines, the transition to web was very good and stable on the magazine side but with huge ups and downs on the newspaper side. The good times were good, but the bad times hit to stay. They are not the big company they used to be.
Many products were killed on purpose but many others were killed by very, very stupid mistakes (I still can't cut my surprise over that) and most of the middle commands were cut and so they got fired too. Trust me: good stuff that used to work was cancelled and killed. I guess desperate times mean desperate measures. Enough context.
One of their remaining websites now includes a link pointing to a page describing an agreement, it's surprising:
- You agree just by being there, there is no ok, accept or cancel button
- They make clear on not being responsible or liable for any responsibility or service
- Any service free or not can be cancelled at any time and you have nothing to say about it
And most importantly: all the data you feed on the website belongs to them for ANY purpose they see fit, be it commercial or not. All our data will be stored on a database so they can perform any commercial or marketing studies and advertising of any kind, be it on the websites or contacting you to sell you anything. This might not be surprising to many around here and would sound "common".
The trick is they explain this applies to ALL your data, be it any account you open to sign up for a forum, web form, or anything. I must say they perform diff dynamics to give people a variety of prizes and they ask for your phone number, email, facebook ID (when they require you to sign up to get the chance to win any of the prizes), name and personal unique ID among other data. They explain ALL of that data belongs to them as long as you input such data on any part of the website.
And you give up any right to complain about "the database" or whatever they do about it, this includes (and it's made clear on the page) they can give or sell your data to any business partner or another businesses because you agree with it.
I won't post literal text or links for obvious reasons. And this reminds me of the last two years there where we were pushed to sign agreements that are not ok (my wife is a lawyer btw so I'm no fool on this, and I got a copy of such document for later study). The first draft was badly made, it was illegal so they took a step back from that attempt, the second attempt was carefully studied (and while not illegal it wasn't ok).
Interesting, suddenly not even an ok button and you agreed to them selling your data or giving it away for free to any other company. I must remind you, to make this thread clear some services (paid services) require your personal data, so if you buy a small information package you just gave away your data and it's ok for them to sell it to other companies.
So how about that?
