So I was browsing Mr Eric Berg DC in youtube, and found out he was on this social media I never heard of.
Turned out it has Sir Tim Berners-Lee the world wide web inventor as its advisor, and it uses the Privacy Bill of Rights that I think is soooo great
I think there's a benefit in governments took away people's phone number from the telecommunications providers. Just the number not the services, so that when we objected to certain practices, we could just change to their competitors without having to change number.
Cause this is not 2001 when our number is just a relationship between the company and us, now it is tied to our banking, to other important applications that contains our public administrative identities. How could we change number now? and moreover in the future?
Cause there are clauses in most terms and conditions where they could change the terms and conditions, the contract, at their own whim and our continued usage of their services would be considered as acceptance and binding. If it were a business contract you would be scratching our hair vigorously and objected to it with passion.
The digital terms and conditions might seem harmless some years ago, but overtime people are going to face problems, and one way or the other they are going to be "forced" to abuse some of the terms or clauses to their benefit, something unusual. Let's say in another 3 years they're going to want to do it again, and their business were going to be built upon the abuse... for example it used to be just a company storing your data in their own server, now they are sharing your data with third parties, and then next they couldn't conduct their businesses without it, the overtime there would come a need to require you to guarantee permission to your data for the next 2 years or 5 years... I mean something like that, since nobody's paying attention, and nobody's calling them out, it's only usual that they are going to build upon it and build upon it and build upon it.
Now I'm reading this telecommunication company's terms and conditions, and if it were other sites on the internet I would just object to the usual, lengthy, foreign, and hard to decipher, but now what's at stake is my number that I've been using for long and for most of my lifestyle needs... I couldn't just object... and what if they started some predatory practices? there's nothing I could do about it but to change my number... and then I had to start over again (I would be missing some data update with other applications that might still be tracking my interests based on the old number).
This is not good, but what could I do about it?
Sometimes products offer warrants, and people would expect that they might not include shipping costs. Restaurants might offer discounts, but not including drinks... another "expected" terms.
But if a product had uncommon terms such as, "partially licensed not 100% sold", or requires users to have another product or to buy another accessories in order to fully function, or legal peculiarities such as phones imported from countries banned by the U.S, unregistered board / machines, or other uncommon, unexpected terms like that... the products should be labelled or marked with an "unusual practices" label.
In order for such labels to work, countries or territories needed to define their currently common terms of trade and services. This also would make it easier for terms and conditions reader such as myself if this motivated companies to highlight discrepancies of their terms from the defined "standards".
