I admire your fiery defense of a friend! But do you really think the terms of service and privacy policies and practices are “plain as day” for Unroll.me, or any tech company?
I just downloaded Book Crawler to categorize all of my books. It brought order to my crazy book collection, which numbers 1,305 books (which I wouldn’t have known without Book Crawler!) Now I can find any book, anywhere, any time.
And I’ve read every single one of these 1K+ books, some more than once. Some more than twice, even. But I’ve never read the entire terms and conditions Apple makes me click to agree. It looks longer than Tolstoy and about as interesting as an undergraduate Social Science text book. I don’t think I’m alone in this.
The Unroll.me terms and conditions and privacy policy combine for 5,000+ words (with the classic indemnification of “We do not warrant the accuracy, completeness or usefulness of this information” whatever that means).
It’s not as long as the Apple agreement, thankfully, but it still felt like a punishment to read it. But I did, every word! I felt like you raised some good points in your post — namely, that we should take care to be more specifically aware of what we’re trading away for the right to use a so-called free app.
I expected most of what I read, though I would still hesitate to call any of it ‘plain as day’. But I did learn something new — I learned that the data Unroll.me collects is not limited to the mailbox I gave it access to, but includes where I am, even when I’m not using my phone!
It was plain as day, right there in the privacy agreement:
In cases where you use a mobile device to access our sites, we will receive information about the location of your device. In some cases, even if you are not using a mobile device, information about your general location may be discernable from your device’s IP address or the URLs we receive. If you access or use our sites or services with your mobile telephone, we may collect your telephone number.
This was a surprise. I don’t generally hand out my telephone number willy-nilly, and I actually didn’t know it might be being scraped by a service that I use specifically to organize my email. Why would I? My cell phone isn’t related to the core activity I am using Unroll.me for. This seems like the opposite of ‘plain as day’ to me.
Should I be worried that my cell number and location data is being sold to the highest bidder? And what does Unroll.me do if/when the government or law enforcement demands the release of a user’s personal data with no warrant— will Unroll.me roll over, or will they defend user privacy (and thereby, the Constitution)? It’s not plain as day, to me, what they’d do, and I’d like to know.
I’m sure the CEO of Unroll.me is nothing like the CEO of Uber (well, I’m not sure, but your defense of him makes me believe it), and had little to do with the creation of the Terms and Privacy statements — some lawyer did it for him. And his passion for customers seems sincere in his blog post.
But it raises a question about how clear, really, any of us are about what we’re giving away in exchange for the use of a ‘free’ app, and how actively transparent we have a right to expect app services to be.
I think we can all admit that if it’s not clear without a 5,000 word legal agreement, it’s not clear.
