When asked to accept terms of use and privacy policies that state it will to remove rights I otherwise had or accept unreasonable terms undermining my privacy, I choose away the service. I simply do not have the conscience to accept terms I have no indention of upholding. But how are the system and service providers to know how many people they scared away? Normally I just quietly walk away. But today, I tried a new approach. I sent the following email (removing the specifics, as I am not out to take the specific service in question) to the service provider I decided to not use, to at least give them one data point on how many users are unhappy with their terms:
From: Petter Reinholdtsen
Subject: When terms of use turn users away
To: [contact@some.site]
Date: Sat, 07 Dec 2019 16:30:56 +0100Dear [Site Owner],
I was eager to test the system, as it seemed like a fun and interesting application of [some] technology, but after reading the terms of use and privacy policy on <URL: https://www.[some.site]/terms-of-use > and <URL: https://www.[some.site]/privacy-policy > I want you to know that I decided to turn away. There were several provisions in the terms and policy turning me off, but the final term that convinced me was being asked to sign away my right to reverse engineer.
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Happy hacking
Petter Reinholdtsen
I do not expect much to come out of it, but sharing it here in case others want to give something similar a try too. If companies discover their terms scare away enough people, perhaps they will be improved...
